There are adapters that will let you put a laptop hard drive into a regular system. You can pick them up at microcenter for $6 or something. Depending on the distro your wanting to install, you may be able to boot from floppy and do a network install as well. On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:10:13 -0600, Christopher Kanaan <ckanaan@gmail.com> wrote:

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I recently acquired an old IBM Thinkpad (550MHz Celeron) with a broken cd-rom drive. I would like to remove windows and put linux on there. I went through the bios menu's and found that it only boots from FLOPPY, CDROM, or HARD DRIVE. It does have USB and a 10/100 cardbus ethernet. I guess I was wondering if anyone had any creative ideas on how to get linux on this beast or if anyone had and external (usb) floppy disk drive or an external cd-rom that they could bring to the meeting on tuesday night.

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On Monday 14 March 2005 03:10 pm, Christopher Kanaan wrote:

I recently acquired an old IBM Thinkpad (550MHz Celeron) with a broken cd-rom drive. I would like to remove windows and put linux on there. I went through the bios menu's and found that it only boots from FLOPPY, CDROM, or HARD DRIVE. It does have USB and a 10/100 cardbus ethernet. I guess I was wondering if anyone had any creative ideas on how to get linux on this beast or if anyone had and external (usb) floppy disk drive or an external cd-rom that they could bring to the meeting on tuesday night.

Does it not have an internal floppy drive? A lot of those Thinkpad's have removeable/interchangable CD/Floppy drives. If that's what this one has, you shoudl be able to get a CD drive (or a floppy) from eBay. I might even have a brand new floppy drive for it (bought for the wrong model.) Unless you can get the BIOS updated to boot from USB devices, I don't think you're going to succeed without an internal floppy or CD.