[Discuss] Installing without an optical drive...

[Leamy Acoustic Art Inc.]

Hello all, I am looking for direction.

        During an upgrade of my laptop, my cd-rom died. I had completed
the initial install, Mandriva 2007 free, and had noticed it was a bit
buggy. There had been some bad packages during install, so I decided to
reinstall. I made it as far as the formatting of the OS partition when
the drive died. I am now left with a virginal OS partition, and my data
partition inaccessible. I have currently tried Installing much smaller
distros ... Puppy and DSL ... with no luck, as well I have tried getting
the data off of my drive using a 2.5 to 3.5 adaptor. No good. I have
also tried using a USB device to remote install DLS onto the OS
partition, again with no luck. In this last case I actually managed to
get as far as detecting hardware, etc, before it returned errors that
ended the install.

        If anyone has suggestions that might help me get a working OS
onto the system I would appreciate it. I am planning on finding a new
optical drive for my laptop ... Toshiba Satellite 1800 ... but until
then I would simply like an installed OS to allow me to transfer data on
and off the system, do basic word processing, etc.

        Thanks in advance for any tips, and just so you know what level
of verbosity to aim for, I am basically a desktop user.

        Michael Leamy.