Odd installation situation, what to do?

[russdog]

I have 2 old Toshiba laptops (Porteges 2000 and R100). Neither one has a floppy drive or a CD drive. I have a CD with the standard ISO of Ubuntu 10.4 and another CD with the Alternate version of Ubuntu 10.4. While I have a USB CD/DVD drive, telling the laptops to boot from the USB-CDROM does not work because both laptops are old enough that they won't boot from USB.

Laptop-1 is running Ubuntu 10.4. Laptop-2 is running zilch with an empty HDD presently formatted NTSF. I have a USB-enclosure for the HDD. I want to place Laptop-2's HDD in the USB enclosure, attach it to Laptop-1 as sdb, and do whatever is necessary to prepare that HDD so that I can then reinstall it in Laptop-2 and have Laptop-2 run Ubuntu-10.4.

So far, I have tried 3 methods of preparing Laptop-2's HDD so that Laptop-2 will boot from it, but none of them resulted in Laptop-2 booting from the HDD. First, I used gparted to partition Laptop-2's HDD as appropriate, and then copied all of Laptop-1's boot partition to it. No joy. When that didn't work, I then attempted to clone Laptop-1's HDD to Laptop-2 via ddrescue. No joy. I then attempted to get Laptop-2 to boot from it's original Windows restore CD, and that didn't work just like I thought it wouldn't (due to the boot-via-USB issue).

As you can see, I have accomplished more-than-several wasted hours but not much else. I would greatly appreciate it if somebody could help this turn out well. What steps should I take to accomplish what I am trying to do?

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums russdog

You could try unetbootin ... you should be able to put the alternate install CD on the hard drive and then transfer the hard drive back to the laptop, boot from it and do the install.

[Bemk]

In my experience the alternate doesn't work, as it tries to mount the USB as a CDROM, which failed dramatically. The normal disc should work just fine though.

[rcgreen]

Do you have access to a standard desktop PC with a cdrom drive?
Put the hard drive into the enclosure, plug it into the PC and boot
from the installation cd. Install the OS to the external drive, and
make sure the bootloader is also installed to that same drive. To be
really safe you could disconnect the PCs internal hard drive to avoid
mistakes.

Now the drive can be taken from the enclosure and put back into
the laptop.

[Dave68]

The HDD Swap that rcgreen refers to is possible. I did this for my Dad a few months back, and it runs like a champ.

Good Luck,
Dave