My brother-in-law has recently purchased a Sony Vaio SR(??) subnotebook. The computer has no internal cd or floppy (though I do have a USB floppy from my laptop), but does have a PC-Card D-Link network card, and a USB ZIP drive. More unfortunately, it came pre-installed with Windows ME.
He wants to have a dual-boot Debian Woody / Win 2K system. I have a home network with a high-speed (DSL) internet connection, and have installed Debian successfully before over the network to my similarly configured HP Omnibook 500 subnotebook. I was able to install Debian on my HP subnotebok easily, by downloading the relevant boot floppies to my Windows 98 partition, restarting in DOS mode and running the appropriate install.bat file. Though I can boot from the floppy on my machine, I did not need to to install Debian. However, MS have decided to remove the option to start into DOS with Windows ME, so there is nowhere to run the install.bat script from. We replaced Windows ME with Windows 2000, assuming that surely you can boot to DOS in Win2k, but it doesn't seem to have such an option either. >From a Google search, the only solution I have seen to running loadlin under Win ME/2K is to use a boot disk. Unfortunately, though we were able to get the USB floppy working in Windows ME/2K, the bios in the Sony Vaio does not seem to recognize it initially, and will not boot from it. I see two possible solutions here; 1) Install an older version of Windows (Win 98, or even just DOS 6.22 (I have the floppies somewhere :)), and then run install.bat. This will get linux installed. However, we also want to have Win2K installed. I expect that installing Win2k will probably wipe out the MBR and lilo. If so, this would put us back in the same position as before, as we have no bootable floppy drive, and cannot run loadlin to access the linux partition. Would installing grub instead of lilo avoid this? 2) Buy a USB or PC-Card CD-ROM/RW, and boot from that. I have read elsewhere that this computer will boot from a PC-Card CD-ROM. We would then just use, i.e., a Win98 CD and F3 out of the install to a DOS prompt, and run the Debian install.bat. But we don't have (or need) a PC-Card or USB CDROM, and would rather avoid spending $$$ on one to install Linux if there is an alternative. Any suggestions?
