linux on an old laptop

[Jonathan Hutchins]

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.