[ale] Remote boot/install on old notebook, no floppy/CD/ethernet?

[James P. Kinney III]

Pull the hard drive and put it into a USB drive box. Verify the drive is
usable. Then do an install onto the usb drive from the other machine.

The slowness of doing and install over serial port sounds painful.

You can also dd a boot floppy system onto the drive.

On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 09:55 -0400, mute wonder wrote:
> I want to do something with an old notebook that fails to bootup due
> to a "corrupt or missing partition table" 
> 
> Windows 95 or 3.1 is on it now.  I'd ultimately like to replace that
> with a Linux distro that'll run on less than 400MHz PII, less than
> 100MB RAM.  However, I'm used to installing via CD and/or floppy, and
> this notebook has neither.  No ethernet, not even a dial-up modem
> port.  What to do, what to do...
> 
> *PC to PC*:  The notebook has a serial DB9, printer DB25, and one USB
> ports.  Would it be viable to connect it to another computer and
> remotely repartition the notebook, install stuff and so on?
> 
> *Get removable drives*:  There's another connector labeled for an
> external floppy or CD drive.  It looks most like a SCSI VHDCI68, but
> that's a half-educated guess. I know little about SCSI, and have less
> experience with them.  So, any information regarding external SCSI
> floppy or CD drives would be good. 
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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