Old laptop

[Haiku32]

Just find an old laptop in the attic that seems to work without fault. Honestly didn't have a clue it was there, neither did anybody else. Might have been my brothers, who knows. Got ubuntu on it at the moment but it seems a bit bloated, but just before I went to format it and do a fresh install of ubuntu I realised the optical drive doesn't work - power works but just can't read disks. Touchpad doesn't work either, no big deal though since I hate them. Thought about booting from a usb drive and actually made a bootable flash drive then I went into the bios and found out it doesn't support that!

Any way I can get another OS on there without using a CD or flash drive to boot from? Don't exactly want to spend any money buying a new drive or anything, if I can't get it to work for free then it's not a big deal, just wanted to get some use out of it .

tl;dr Old laptop, how to install an OS without optical drive or booting from a flash drive.

Thanks

[alsenior]

you could try a debian install via netboot there are docs on how to do it all over the internet

[Haiku32]

you could try a debian install via netboot there are docs on how to do it all over the internet

Had a quick look at a few tutorials there, seems as though you still need either a cd or flash drive to contain the netboot installer. I don't know if you boot from this or not though, don't quite understand the basic principle of this quite yet .

Looks a little beyond what I've done before, but I guess I'd give it a shot if I can find a good in-depth tutorial.

[smargh]

Remove hard drive. If IDE, use a suitable converter/cable. Plug it in to a regular PC and install ubuntu on that. It'll probably work fine when put back in to the laptop.

[dirky]

Yep, above method will work fine. Do you have a floppy drive? What kind of laptop is it?

[Haiku32]

Toshiba Tecra M2 I believe. No floppy drive or anything. Decided to take the optical drive out to see if I could spot anything obviously wrong with it. I didn't so I just put it back in and it now plays CDs which it didn't before. Going to try boot from an ubuntu live cd I've got lying around, before I go onto what smargh suggested .