Startup hickups: Messing up my IBM X41

I have played with the idea of installing Linux on my X41 ThinkPad for quite a while now. One of the challenges to overcome is to get things installed in the first place. Not an easy one, it seems, as my X41 comes with no CD-player, no floppy, nothing but its HDD and NIC. I would prefer not to set up an PXE boot server just for the purpose of playing with Linux on my laptop, so I have tried to find other solutions.

Mind you, this have not had any priority, so only when I have had a few moments available, and still had the interest, have I messed with this.

Including:

• buying a cheap USB CD-rom player on ebay. Broken.
• install linux on a stick. No large stick available until today.
• install linux on a stick - the friggin stick is missplaced.
• install linux on a stick - the stick is not reccognized as a boot device...

I bought a second stick the other day, with this experiment in mind. Adding to it that I wanted to run Linux from the stick, and be able to save data on the stick too. Thus, a 2Gb stick was purchased some weeks back. I went looking for it everywhere this morning, and of course, I could not find it. Big shock, huh?

Well, so back to the old, 1Gb stick. This time I would try again. Steps:

1. Download Ubuntu 8.10

2. Install UNetbootin

3. Run UNetbootin, with the Ubuntu ISO-file, and the USB-stick as installation target.

4. Wait. A long time.

5. Reboot. Pray. Nothing.

6. Reboot, enter BIOS (the big, blue Access IBM button), play around with startup sequences. Disable everything except USB devices.

7. Reboot. Pray. White text on black screen: No operating system found.

8. WTF????

9. Reboot. Press blue "Access IBM" button. Expect to enter Rescue mode. White text on black screen: No operating system found. WTF????

... Short break.

Slowly realizing that the access to BIOS on this friggin pc is via the Rescue mode, that is located on a hidden partition on the IDE drive I just disabled from BIOS.

OMG.

... Longer break this time. Sucking hard on a Haribo Piratos. Turning up the volume, Jet, Are you gona be my Girl playing on the Buzz. Shaking my head slowly in disbelive. Not sure about what - the fact that IBM have such a stupid way to enter BIOS, or the fact that I now will be spending the better part of the day to fix the beloved laptop again.

... Thanks to Google, I quickly discovered alternative ways to enable the BIOS on the X41 - like pressing and holding F1 while turning the computer on. So now Windoze XP again awaits my commands.

I have not given up. I am actually going to spend the next 30 minutes to find the new USB stick I bought - the 2Gb one - and see if it will make my dream of running Linux on my X41 come through.

And if I cannot find it, I will just go down to the basement and use one of the Ubuntu server there to make the friggin stick bootable. And if all else fails, PXE - here I come!

Why Linux on my X41, you ask? Well, some people think I am a geek, and I figured I need to live up to their expectations ;)

Do you have any experience with installing Linux on an X41 without CD/DVD player? How did you succeed?

----------------> Edit! <---------------

I have now successfully booted the X41 from a CF card. So the USB stick did not want to boot my X41, it seems. And no, I have not yet found the other stick. That leaves me the options:

1. nuke the HDD and install Linux

2. Continue to run CrunchLinux from the CF card

3. Install Linux on the Western Digital Passport HDD I got...

--------------> !tide <-------------