Frustrated With Tablet PC Installation

[open4biz]

Greetings,

I recently bought a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet PC and it's caused me no end of grief to load linux on it. I would like to load CentOS 5.x (because my hosting company uses it and I will be able to learn as I run it).

Here are my resources:

The tablet does not have a CD-ROM drive.

I found internet resources to create a boot disk that enables me to see my 8GB Sony USB flash drive via DOS. It works nicely.

I have a laptop drive to USB converter and can access the hard drive directly from my Win XP desktop. I have PowerQuest's Partition Magic Pro (v8.0) and can make Ext2 and Ext3 partitions at will. I have also loaded a program that allows Windows XP to read and write from Ext2 and Ext3. It works well.

I have tried loading boot images from PXE. This option is mostly out because it seems to be a couple levels past my competency (I haven't been able to get it to work).

Given those resources, what's the best way to load either the CentOS live CD... or some other approach?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[open4biz]

Since I wrote this, I figured out how to make a boot floppy that can start an external USB CD-ROM/DVD drive. Here are the files on the floppy:

93,040 COMMAND.COM
17,175 DISPLAY.SYS
58,870 EGA.CPI
58,870 EGA2.CPI
58,753 EGA3.CPI
21,607 KEYB.COM
34,566 KEYBOARD.SYS
31,942 KEYBRD2.SYS
31,633 KEYBRD3.SYS
13,014 KEYBRD4.SYS
29,239 MODE.COM
111 AUTOEXEC.BAT
133 CONFIG.SYS
25,361 mscdex.exe
39,729 USBASPI.SYS
5,509 USBCD.SYS
22,258 RAMFD.SYS
16,368 DI1000DD.SYS
33,191 himem.sys
32,225 loadlin.exe
5,832 LINLD.COM

Here's the contents of my config.sys:

DOS=HIGH,UMB
rem device=himem.sys
lastdrive=Z
rem device=RAMFD.SYS
devicehigh=USBASPI.SYS /W /R /v
devicehigh=USBCD.SYS /d:USBCD

Here's the contents of my autoexec.com:

MSCDEX /d:USBCD
linld image=d:\isolinux\vmlinuz "cl=root=/dev/ram boot=install ramdisk_size=1048576 devfs=mount,dall"

I can boot to the CD and launch linld.com. The problem is that I keep getting a kernal panic message, saying that a memory block could not be addressed. And when I add the following part to the line above: "initrd=d:\isolinux\initrd.img" the install fails and reboots. I have tried to expand the initrd.img and it appears... blank?

Could someone help me untwist this problem?

Thanks!

[Rubberman]

Check out Unetbootin (SourceForge.net: UNetbootin, Universal Netboot Installer). It will allow you to create a liveUSB / install disc with most any Linux distribution, including CentOS 5.x. It runs on Windows and Linux, and creates a bootable USB drive. I use it for just such purposes as you need.