*Most* Laptops (of even remotely recent vintage) use "standard" 2.5" IDE
disks. It is possible to get an atapter 'plate' that will allow
installing such a drive in a regular 3.5" drive bay on a desktop
machine.
I know of one person who bought a 'thin' IBM laptop (NO removable
devices), who installed linux this way. *I* plan on upgrading my old
'486 laptop (has floppy and 3com PCMCIA NIC, no CD-ROM) in a similar
manner (you don't really want to know how I installed Linux
originally).
You just pull out the hard drive from the laptop, mount it on the
adapter plate, unhook your desktop's hard drive and connect your adapted
laptop drive. Perform the usual install. You might need to fudge
things WRT the X server in a post install phase later (after
re-installing the laptop's hard drive. You may want to
force the install to install extra X11 server RPMs (or whatever).
In message <sdc91c78.002@border_fs.pcsolutionsmn1.com>, "Stuart Powell" writes:
>Thanks, Al. I guess I'll stop trying then. You do realise I'm going to
>get grief over this because (whiney user voice) "it works in Windows".
>Any idea if we'll ever get support for it, or is it just too old hat for
>anyone to worry about anymore ?
>
>Bye for now,
>Stuart.
>
>>>> Al Crowley <alc@micro-solutions.com> 11/06/02 10:29AM >>>
>Stuart,
>
>There is currently no support for Backpack drives connected via
>PCMCIA in Linux. We only have support for parallel, and most
>recently, USB.
>
>
>
>
>At 10:02 AM 11/6/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>>Hello, everyone.
>>
>>I have spent a great deal of time recently trying to install SuSE
>onto
>>a colleague's aging laptop. The main sticking point has been that
>the
>>only CD-ROM drive for the laptop is a Backpack CD-ROM with a PCMCIA
>>parallel port adapter. We can't use the built-in port as the floppy
>>drive uses that and we need that hooked up to boot from.
>>
>>After many trials and tribulations, I finally did an NFS install of
>the
>>OS, but the Backpack CD resolutely fails to work. I am able to
>insmod
>>paride and bpck, but pcd fails to load. I suspect it is only looking
>>for the CD drive on the built-in port, and not on the PCMCIA one.
>>
>>I tried loading the modules with the IO address of the PCMCIA card
>>(gleaned from W2K on the same machine), but this seems to make little
>>difference.
>>
>>Can anyone help me get this drive working ? We currently have SuSE
>8.1
>>Pro installed.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Stuart.
>>
>>-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net --
>>-- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --
>>
>>
>>
>
>Thank You,
>
>Al Crowley, Technical Support Assistant Manager
>Micro Solutions
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>website: http://www.micro-solutions.com
>e-mail: alc@micro-solutions.com
>fax: 815.756.4986
>tech phone: 815.754.4500 (M-F 8-5 CT)
>
>
>-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net --
>-- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --
\/
Robert Heller ||InterNet: heller@cs.umass.edu
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 06 2002 - 15:54:42 EST