Ok, so I'm attempting to help a friend frugal install puppy on an ancient laptop. I dunno, but the BIOS doesn't support booting from the USB port. Oh, and it has no CD drive. So, to clarify, booting from CD or USB is out as the CD has to use the USB port. It has Win98 on it, and she's attempting to follow (for us noobs) to follow. She's done up to the point of running grubinstall.exe but all she gets is a window flashing quickly saying a failure of some sort occured.

The following tutorial covers the process of installing SUSE Linux to an external USB Hard Drive using the OpenSUSE Live CD. The process is made possible due to a custom Portable SUSE script created by James Rhodes.The user basically boots from the Live OpenSUSE CD and performs the installation via the included YaST2 Install script to install SUSE to a USB Hard drive. In this simple USB Puppy Linux tutorial we illustrate how to easily Create a Puppy Linux USB Flash Drive using the Universal installer included on the Puppy Linux CD. Puppy is a unique Linux compilation created by Barry Kauler.

Accessed 23 August 2007. Buku permata yang hilang download full version.

Is there a way to create a Linux partition, copy the stuff there and make it boot from that partition? Right, the BIOS is too old to boot from a USB port. And since both the thumb drive and external CD drive use the USB port, booting from them is out.

Copying files is still possible while windows is running. I know attempting to upgrade the BIOS is a possibility, but we're kind of hoping to avoid that. Apparently options are hard drive or floppy drive. (Not physically looking at the machine.) Its an old Dell Latitude CSx H with 128meg ram and a 6 gig HD. Currently almost totally used by Win98 bloat.

Last edited by ovid9; January 9th, 2010 at 05:58 AM. I had an almost identical puzzle with an old Toshiba laptop, which had an internal CD drive that was fugged and BIOS that wouldn't boot from USB. I wanted to put Xubuntu onto it. Here's what I'd recommend for you based on how I did it. Almost certainly, your HDD is PATA (a.k.a. Buy yourself an HDD caddy for PATA, which should cost no more than a tenner.

Remove the Dell's HDD and put it in the caddy. (As an option, your friend might want to take this opportunity to purchase a larger HDD to use instead of the 6Gb one. This will give her the peace of mind of always being able to go back to Win98 unaltered if she doesn't like Puppy.) Find a more modern PC that can boot from internal CD. Remove its HDD (very important!) and ensure that CD is the first location searched in the BIOS. Connect the caddy HDD to the USB port of the modern machine. Insert the Puppy CD into the modern machine. Boot up the modern machine.

The Puppy install CD should now install Puppy to just the caddy HDD. Once installed, remove the HDD from the caddy and put it back into the Dell machine. Boot the Dell machine and enjoy Puppy. Put the modern machine's HDD back and you'll see that it'll load up as before - no issues. Sef: Thanks for that link. Lots of handy resources there.

It always seems to be the answer to my question is there somewhere, just being able to find it in the wonderful mass of data. Roger: That was my suggestion as well, and that might still be how this gets accomplished. However, the only other computer in her house is her good laptop, so she didn't want to dissect it as well.

If it comes down to this being the way to go her parents have a desktop she could do it with easily. Darce: We'll give that a shot.