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One assumes that the HDs are standard ide/ata drives? I wouldn't think that DSL would have any problems with that at all. Are you trying to dual-boot it, or just install Linux using the entire disc? If the internal HD's are attached to a RAID controller, then DSL might have a problem with that. Let me know some more about your specific hardware.

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!

Well, I would think that most current Linux distributions wouldn't have any problem with a standard IDE controller, even if you are running a PII chip. When you run the LiveCD, can you access or see the drives? IE: look in /dev and see if you have some entries like /dev/hda1 and/or /dev/sda1, etc.

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!

AFAIK, you can't, assuming I understand the situation you are proposing here. Let me restate it to be sure I am clear. 1. Your system cannot boot from USB 2. You have a hard drive attached via USB 3. You have a floppy, which presumably the system can boot from. 4. You want to boot to the USB hard drive directly from the BIOS. If this is correct, then I don't think you can. However, you can put a small boot loader and system on the floppy that will mount the USB disc, change your root file system to the hard drive (chroot /media/drivename/root), and finish booting from there. The details I'm not certain of, though I could probably do this with a day's worth of effort and some research. There are probably others on this forum that can already tell you exactly what to do and tools available to do it.

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!

Floppy, what's that? Oh yes, I see some boxes on the back of a shelf that say something like that, and there are these square, flat, plastic-covered thingies in them. Is that what you mean? Honestly, I haven't used one in at least 5 years. The last time was to install a BIOS upgrade to a spare system at work so it could boot from CD. I think it was a Micron system. We were installing a version of Linux on it to use as a testbed router that could be used to inject errors in the network data stream in order to exercise our software's ability to recover from network failures during QC. A necessary thing since our product was designed for high-availability manufacturing systems and customer downtime was $millions USD an hour. Nothing like the need to put an engineer on a plane to a destination 1/2 way around the world in the back-of-beyond to help one realize that failure analysis is much more comfortable in the home office than sitting on a factory floor in a bunny suit at 3:00am after a 24 hour flight and all the fun with airport security and customs on the way...

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!

One other option since DSL runs on your box is to install a Puppy Linux Distro. Tons of Different Flavors of Puplet Distros out there. Puppy has a tool to make a Wake Pup Floppy that will find Puppy on a USB Pendrive and USB External Hardrive and boot it up. Just another option is all.