I recently acquired a Toshiba Satellite 430CDT, and I like it a lot.
I put an SD to IDE adapter in lieu of the missing hard drive.

I'm looking to dual boot Win98SE and Mandrake Linux 7.0 (for which I have a set of install CDs).

First problem; I have no floppy drive for the system.
Second problem; the system is so old... it can't boot from CDROM. The option doesn't even exist in bios.

The 430CDT is a 120 mhz pentium, 800 x 600 display (2mb video ram), currently with 16mb of ram (I just ordered a 32 mb expansion that should bring it up to 48 total).

So how to install an OS? I knew I wanted 98SE, because I want to get a (hopefully wireless) PCMCIA card and network it.

I have win98SE on CDROMs... but the drive can't boot from them.

I also have a 32bd CF card, with Win98SE already installed that was used as the main drive form my K6 computer (now defunct because of the mice I didn't know had gotten into the case).

So, using two adapters, I connected the CF card and a 32gb SD card (formatted fat32) to my Linux desktop, and using the dd command, mirrored the drive.
Success! The 430CDT needed to add some drivers and some configuration changes (like turning the page file back on), but it worked.

So then I got myself a 64gb SD card, formatted it fat32, and dd copied the CF card over. Once complete, I then created a second 32gb (well, 30gb) partition and formatted it fat32.
Worked like a charm; the computer boots up, even sees the 2nd partition.

I then put the Linux install disk into the computer... read the README file... which said I needed to reboot the computer from the CD in order to proceed with the install.

I'm not married to Mandrake; it was just convenient because I have the disks, and it was old enough that it _should_ work.
Can any one suggest a way I could install a Linux distro onto that second partition (w/o wiping the 1st one), since I can't boot from the CD drive?

I do have a couple laptops that _will_ boot from the CD drive... but I don't want to install Linux on them.