[Discuss] Installing without an optical drive...

[David Bronaugh]

Leamy Acoustic Art Inc. wrote:
> 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.
>   
If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you might try a netboot net 
install. However, this is beyond what I might expect a "desktop user" to 
do -- so your call.

Basically, though, here's the story: You can tell the machine to boot 
from LAN. Make sure that you've got a machine with a DHCP server 
configured to spew out appropriate info to that MAC address. Install 
tftpd-hpa (trivial FTP protocol daemon). Download the Ubuntu CD, mount 
the image, and point the tftpd at it (look in inetd.conf).

If everything goes well, it'll boot via tftp and you'll have a working 
(basic) linux system, all without floppies or optical drives. If the 
machine that runs the DHCP server is additionally a router, you can do a 
full net install of Ubuntu. Otherwise, you can use the base system to 
get at your data.

Doubt this is what you're after, but it'd be my preferred solution.

David