I have two of those Toshiba Satellite Pro notebooks that I tried to install
Linux onto and had some difficulty.  The thing to keep in mind is that your
notebook is a first generation Pentium notebook and several of the popular
distributions come with installers that are compiled for Pentium II or
better.  I think current distributions of Mandrake and Redhat installers
will hang near the beginning of the install process.  I ended up installing
FreeBSD on my notebooks because their current installer worked with the
processor.  I can lend you an external floppy if you need.

Gilbert

> On Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:22:56 -0400 (EDT) Scott Henderson
<boyhowdy@cyberspace.org> wrote:
>
> I've acquired a Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT laptop and
> would like to install Linux on it... but it isn't
> capable of booting to a CD, and the CD and floppy
> drives fit into the same, single bay.  So I can use one
> or the other, not both (don't have a connector cable).
> How can I    1) create a install disk to begin an
> install, and 2) swap out to the CD and have it
> recognized to run the install?  Or am I going at this
> wrong?  How can I install to such a machine?
>
> Could I perhaps install a minimal system on a floppy,
> boot to it, set up the hd, copy the minimal system to
> the hd, then boot with the CD in and run the install?
>
> Thanks!!