install from CD, or dedicated drive?

Hi Friends,

I have an old cluncker that boasted windows xp with 128 M Ram and frequent failures (also it's 10 years old...). It finally died for good I think, with a chkdsk loop I'm not inclined to fix because windows is not appropriate for this computer anyway. I want to put a small footprint Linux on this computer (I'm thinking damnsmall, any comments?).

Given that I want to swap the hard drive anyway, and will stick it in another pc to save files... and I have an empty hard drive I can pop in, should I:

1) burn a CD and install to the empty hard drive from the CD (caveat: this computer is notoriously finicky with CD's, I've changed the drive out but it doesn't seem to help much)

2) install DSL or other linux on the empty hard drive while it's still in the guts of another PC, then transplant it to the clunker (my question: how to do this when I don't want to mess with the OS of the host PC?)

by the way I did try DSL on a pen, but my BIOS doesn't show my pen drive as a possible boot device :(.

Thanks for your help, I am a total newbie at Linux!!!

Nunzilla
Baptizing computers since her TI-994A

A lot of older systems didn't support booting from USB, but many have an updated bios that will do so. See if you can find an updated BIOS to install - it is not a good idea to install Linux on a drive in another system because the hardware can be so different, and incompatible. You can burn an installation CD on another system, however, and then use that to install on yours.

puppy linux ,vector linux, beatrix, blag and arch, all run on older systems ok
beatrix needs clean drive, vector can be fun but you need a little skill with setting up partitions, puppy linux can require a little careful planning, but arch and blag are not live cd they are install cds these are a few of the many different distros
Puppy will run very fast on the system you have! I run it on an old thinkpad(233 mghz cpu, 128 meg of ram) puppy actually boots faster than the bios lag time on this old laptop. about 50 seconds to start puppy but bios lag time is 1 min 40 sec.