(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have A toshiba laptop, and the cd drive went bad in it, I would like to reinstall puppy onto it, but all I have left is the floppy drive. how can I install puppy from floppy disks only?

Do you have any USB port or network connection in your Laptop?

Puppy is around 90-100 Mb, so it means at least 70 floppies to copy...

With some networking (or USB) you could copy the needed files to the HD (even with another OS), and then boot puppy with the "wake-pup" floppy.

borrow a usb external hd or
copy the files from a computer on your network.im sure you can make a frugal instal by just making a folder and putting the 3-4 main files in it.
how you would install grub im not sure.maybe you can use wakepup floppy to get it to boot.

There are two easy ways to achieve your objective.

The easiest of all, even for folks not used to messin' with HW, is to remove the drive, obtain a cheap 2.5" to 3.5" adapter from CPC.co.uk, Radioshack, w.h.y. depending where you live - once again ALWAYS be sure you edit your profile to show where you live - and install Puppy via a regular desktop box. Just too easy to detail - I've described it too many times before.

Secondly, there are numerous free 'chop & rejoin' utilities available on the Web that will enable you to chop and rejoin your files onto floppies. Why not go for MeanPupv2.2, SliTaz or best of all TinyCore which are much smaller.

If you have USB, it should be easy to run Puppy from that. USB 2 is much faster, hope you have that. I installed Puppy on the hard drive on my old laptop with USB 1, no CD, and it will works, but too slow for some things. More memory isn't recognised, or it would be fine.

I think I read somewhere here about installing from the iso directly, not burning a CD.

Reply with more detail about your Toshiba, we (not me so much as the more experienced peeps here) could give you more direction.

I wouldn't do the floppy thing except as a last resort. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to get Puppy installed without a CD. If the Toshiba is your only computer, or you don't have an OS on it ,you may have to go to the library or something to get things downloaded, copied to USB, etc.

The toshiba has one usb slot, but bios doesn't support booting from it. network booting is a no go, there is no way to network with it without buying a pcmcia card. I think I'm just going to try to buy a adapter and put it into my Desktop and install from there. seems cheapest and easiest! thanks for all your help guys!