Problems Installing Linux- (Damn Small Linux)
 

I know this is a hardware problem, but I am posting here for advice anyways. I have an old (1996 or so) Toshiba Tecra 510CDT. It had no operating system, so I put windows xp on it (it's all i had). Needless to say on a pentium 1 processor win xp is a bit slow. I know nothing about linux, but I heard about this 'damn small linux' distribution. I made a boot disc and ran it using my newer desktop computer, and it worked fine, I liked it- seems perfect for my old laptop.
Here is the problem- I can't get the laptop to boot the disc. In BIOS, boot from cd is not a choice.. it has, FDD (there is no floppy disc), HDD and HDD2. Is there a way to download linux (preferably a small version that will work well with my slow old laptop) directly onto the hard drive, or somehow get it to replace windows? I heard about this network install, or something like that, but I have no idea what this means.
Any advice would be great.
The laptop has no usb ports, no floppy disc, but the cdrom drive (10x) works fine.

When you say there is no floppy disk, do you mean you do not have a disk, or something is wrong with the floppy drive? If it has a floppy drive, and if you could purchase a floppy disk somewhere (walmart, office depot, staples, etc) you'd be in luck.

Older laptops/computers cannot boot from a bootable cd, which presents a problem when trying to get a newer OS (such as linux) installed. A while back, I ran into a similar problem. I ran across 'Smart Boot Manager' which is a bootable floppy disk that allows you to boot media such as cd-roms and usb drives on older computers that cannot. There site is located here: http://btmgr.webframe.org/ It appears their site is down at the moment, but you should be able to acces it via google's cache. Anyway, try that, see if it helps any.

A network install is essentially using a live linux system (ie: from either a cd, floppy, or usb drive) to boot a computer. The live system is small, usually only large enough to containt the tools needed to partition the disk and start the ftp/ssh installation. More information can be found here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Network-Install-HOWTO.html

Are you sure btmgr needs a floopy drive in order for it to work? because I don't have one

ohhh ok, I understand now. I got it to work, once, now there is a new problem, see the newer topic I posted please.