How I got Mepis 6 on Toshiba 3110ct without CD rom support

I'm posting this for anyone who is struggling with getting SimplyMepis 6 (or any) onto a laptop which does not have CD boot support in the bios and doesn't have USB boot support in the bios.

This may be old hat for some of you big dogs out there but two of us went at this for several days so apparently you are keeping it to yourselves.

We were 3 time losers on this system because we didn't have the factory cd drive (which wouldn't have booted anyway) and we were forced to use a USB to IDE converter with a Plextor CD burner, with a Mepis Live CD inside. The odds of getting all three of those to go at once was slim to none.

HERE IS WHAT WE TRIED:

The 3 floppy set made from the Mepis 6 cd did not work for two reasons... one they were looking for a specific linux kernel version and two, the code in the vmlinuz now says that floppy boot support is no longer supported. Makes you wonder why it was even on the CD in the first place. Anyway, didn't know if it would support a CD-IDE booter anyway.

Next we tried the bootable floppy from Runt Linux which does not care about the version, It just wants to boot... something. It detected the IDE-CD drive through the USB port but none of the switches we tried would give life.

Next we went at this for a while trying different boot loaders but many of those wanted to use the bios which didn't support USB or CD booting.

One guy suggested making a small (700meg) partition and puting the CD image there and installing from the HDD as if it were a CD. That had so many problems and side effects, we rejected it outright.

Finally went back to square one after reading that xFree would re detect if it couldn't find /etc/X11/xorg.conf

HERE IS WHAT WORKED (AND WORKED EASILY):

Inoticed that when I took a pre-loaded distro from another HDD system and put it in the wannabee system, it would boot. But only to a root prompt, no xserver due to differences in the systems. The only problem was how to get xserver to redetect the hardware differences. After giving up manually editing the config and looking hopelessly for some re-detect feature on the system, I ran across a post that said just to delete the xorg.conf file and it would redetect. Could it really be that simple?

Took the HDD out of the wanabee system and moved it to another Laptop that did have CD boot support. In this case a Gateway Solo 9300. The hardware differences between the Gateway and the Toshiba could not have been more significant.

Booted the SimplyMepis CD on the host laptop and did a complete install on the wanabee hard drive.

Rebooted the host system on the wannabee HDD and as root, renamed the filename of /etc/X11/xorg.conf to be origxorg.conf.orig (just to make sure)

Then did an immediate shutdown of the host Gateway system.

Moved the wannabee HDD from the host Gateway to the wannabee Toshiba system.

Powered it up and let it re-detect the xserver stuff (did this automatically) due to the now missing xorg.conf file and it came up without ANY intervention at all and provided the login dialog.

I logged in and lived happily ever-after.

Now how's that for simple?