Installing RedHat8.0 without rebooting

I need to install RedHat8.0 on a limping laptop. It's got no working disk drive and the only CD drive I've got is a USB CDRW (btw, the computer is a Compaq Presario 1200T).

That means that booting up from a disk or CD is out of the question. I can boot the computer just fine, I just can't boot from the devices.

Any ideas or resources for installing RedHat8.0 (from a 5CD set) into the computer without having to boot up from a disk or CD?

The only other way I can see doing this is by a network boot but I don't know the specifics of what's needed to start the install process. Also, you need a special type of network card to do this...one that's PXE enabled.

what os is the laptop running now? if it is on a fat filesystem, i know a way:

- put all cds on c:\rh
- use partition magic (or any redhat / linux tool that you can find) to resize the partition to a minimum and free the rest of your hd.
- boot into the command line and use loadlin to execute a kernel from c:\rh . SuSE comes with an installation image that you can supply as root in this case, i never used redhat, so i can´t tell... if you can´t find anything similar, post back, we´ll find a way
- hope the redhat installation kernels are vfat-enabled (if not, build your own on another machine...) - and install from /dev/hda1/rh/

"loadlin to execute a kernel"

how would I do that?

could you recommend any place to read up on it?

Google is the best place to start.

loadlin is a dos program that contains a boot-loader for linux.
it is used like this:

c:\linux\loadlin.exe <kernel> <parameter>

eg.

c:\linux\loadlin.exe c:\linux\vmlinuz initrd=c:\linux\bootimage.img

read: the loadlin documentation.