Install without CDROM or Network Boot

[Michael Harris]

Hi,

I am trying to put FC5 on a Gateway 9300 Laptop. It is about 5 years
old and still has plenty of life left in it, except:

1/ The internal CDROM drive is faulty. It won't read discs reliably. A
replacement is likely to cost more than the value of the machine
2/ I do have an external USB CDROM, but the laptop does not include
any options to boot from any kind of USB device
3/ It does not boot from the network. Being a laptop, getting a PXE
network card doesn't look to be easy
4/ It does have a floppy disk drive, but Fedora does not include an
installation image for floppy these days. And anyway the FDD is not in
much better shape than the CDROM Drive :) I did see a method to boot
from floppy here: http://www.thisiscool.com/fcfloppy.htm, but have not
had a successful run at that yet.

On the plus side, I do have a working Win98 installation in one
partition and a working Redhat 9.0 release in another. I plan to scrub
the RH9 partition & load FC5 on it, but keep the windows one.

I looked into using the 'smart boot manager' but found that it cannot
boot from USB devices.

Is there any way to start the installation either from the Win98 side,
or from the RH 9.0 side, reading from the USB CDROM instead?

Or can I maybe copy the boot part of the FC5 installer onto the HDD,
boot that, then use it to install off the USB CDROM drive?

Or maybe is there a software out there, similar to 'smart boot
manager', that can boot from a USB CDROM drive? Is that even feasible?

Any help appreciated!

Regards
Mike Harris