mr_arc
January 18th, 2010, 01:23 PM
Hi all
I have a Dell Lattitude LS. It gets used for very light web browsing, RDP into my main PC and also to access Megasquirt in my car.
It had until recently a stripped out XP install there that ran ok despite the laptop being a P3 500, 256mb RAM.
That install is now damaged, it gets as far as the login screen and then hangs. Instead of repairing it, i want to put ubuntu on there as i think it'll manage the (lack of) resources better.
However, the laptop has no optical drive, cannot boot from USB and i'm not sure if the external FDD i have for it works either (it's a bit crusty).
I do have a pata > usb convertor to access the drive via my main PC though.
Am just not sure what I can put on there to let me boot and then install.
Is it plausible to make the HDD act like a LiveCD?
Should I partition it, and copy the install ISO contents into one of the partitions, and go from there - but how do i make that bootable?
I do have another laptop with a PATA HDD that does have a working optical drive. Could I begin the install on that, then pull the drive and swap it over at some point during the install - or is that a no go?
I have a Dell Lattitude LS. It gets used for very light web browsing, RDP into my main PC and also to access Megasquirt in my car.
It had until recently a stripped out XP install there that ran ok despite the laptop being a P3 500, 256mb RAM.
That install is now damaged, it gets as far as the login screen and then hangs. Instead of repairing it, i want to put ubuntu on there as i think it'll manage the (lack of) resources better.
However, the laptop has no optical drive, cannot boot from USB and i'm not sure if the external FDD i have for it works either (it's a bit crusty).
I do have a pata > usb convertor to access the drive via my main PC though.
Am just not sure what I can put on there to let me boot and then install.
Is it plausible to make the HDD act like a LiveCD?
Should I partition it, and copy the install ISO contents into one of the partitions, and go from there - but how do i make that bootable?
I do have another laptop with a PATA HDD that does have a working optical drive. Could I begin the install on that, then pull the drive and swap it over at some point during the install - or is that a no go?