how to get vista on a laptop with no DVD

[Embarker]

As the title states, i have a tosh portege that has a pcmcia cd drive.

Any ideas of how to get vista on it?

It does have boot from lan, but have never done any of this. Bios only has boot from cd/usb floppy and HHD

Was going to swap hd but mine is a 1.8 and others are 2.5's.

Is there a 1.8 to 2.5 converter?

Can the dvd of vista be cut up and placed on cd's and just swap them over when vista says "missin file"

Finally, laptop has 256mb on board and a 1gb sodimm, is there a fast speed sd card that can be used with the speed up utility or this only for USB devices?

Any help appreciated

Rgds

Dangerous "vista" dave

[eternaldark]

Chances are if you need to do all this to try and get vista installed then your laptop wont run vista. Its a fairly demanding O/S

[Singh400]

You can install Vista by external DVD drive (USB).

[Embarker]

Originally Posted by eternaldark

Chances are if you need to do all this to try and get vista installed then your laptop wont run vista. Its a fairly demanding O/S

Trouble is it's got a 40bg drive split into two so to do the vista test i've got to merge the drive with partion magic.

It works fine on a cheap advent laptop, with a lower spec - so fingers crossed it's worth it.

[ElchenUK]

The 1.8 hdd will have the same I/O interface as the 2.5 so you could get a 2.5 IDE cable and attach it to a desk top, copy the boot and setup files from the vista cd/dvd and then place bakc into the portege and run setup from HDD. Not sure if Vista is the same as XP but with XP I copied across the I386 folder to a Libretto HDD and ran set up on there whilst it was still attached to the PC, this was so that I could get round the hardware test. Once it got past the hardware test and required the first reboot I unplugged it and plugged it in the Libretto and carried on the set up from there! Worked great!