I have an old Dell laptop, but the CD Rom drive is not working and I don't have another to replace it with. It does have USB ports and I have flashdrives, but it doesn't have the option in bios to boot from a USB port.

My thought is that if somehow I could boot from floppy, maybe I could copy the iso across from another machine to the hard drive from my home network .

To be honest, I'm too much of a newbie to linux to know how to get it running myself. I wish I had a spare CD-ROM drive, but don't.

Another idea would be to pull the hard drive, hook it up as the second drive in another machine, and load the antix to it there, then move it back to the laptop, and then install it to a second partition on the same drive after booting it from the first partition.

Any suggestions would be appreciated...

Thanks

The
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might fit on a floppy. It might let you boot off a LiveUSB. I'm not a big fan of PLOP but the great benefit of this approach (if it works) is it gives you an alternative way to boot into your system when something goes wrong.

If that doesn't work then removing the hard drive should work, especially if you can plug the drive into the other box with a usb enclosure. Then you can make it into a LiveUSB with either UNetbootin or antix2usb.

When you plug it back into the Dell, you will have to use the"from=hd" boot parameter to tell the live system to boot off of an internal hard drive. *BUT* if you also make a real LiveUSB at the same time and have it plugged in and then use"from=usb", it will boot off of the actual LiveUSB and this will free up you hard drive for the install.

IIRC, the current installer will not wipe out a partition before installing to it so all of the LiveUSB files will remain intact when you do the install over an existing partition.

If you have another machine that boots from usb/cdrom & your drive will fit it, I would install it that way, but I suggest you disconnect the other machines HDD before attempting to install, (mistakes can be made), & it will also save possibly having to change the grub boot menu & fstab files.
I have done it this way several times, easier overall than some other methods.

Those are good suggestions. I haven't tried opening up the machine yet to see what kind of drive it is, but if it will pop out easily and fit another machine, I agree that would likely be the easy route.

The Plop floppy boot or network boot is really what I was looking for though, but its obviously not as simple as I had hoped, because I don't currently have a machine setup as a server for it to work from.

There is a plop floppy image available. This is real easy and is how I boot USB on the Old Sony.

Well, the Plop floppy boot manager method worked because it allows you to continue the boot (using shift enter on usb) from the usb on a machine that doesn't allow for boot from usb.

this topic on plop forum helped

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The tricky part was to get the usb to boot afterwards. Using the same 2 gb chip it was able to work with 1 usb adapter, but not another. I found it out by trying to boot the usb directly in a machine that is able to boot from usb, and when it wouldn't boot from that one, I tried a different adapter, and when it worked with that, I moved it back to the Dell laptop with the plop boot manager floppy, and at that point it worked well enough to install the antix.

THANKS for helping __{{emoticon}}__

Kudos!