USB-serial conversion. Help please?

I hope this is the appropriate Forum area....
I have an old Acernote light 370p that I would like to install Linux on.
At the moment the CMOS battery needs replacing (Which I have ordered).
However, the floppy drive (an external serial port connection) does not work.
And the Linux I have is on a CD. I cannot use the CD drive to boot, as I cannot change the BIOS (hoping this will change when CMOS battery is replaced).
Now to my question....
If I was to attach my desktop computer (via USB) to the serial port that is used for the start-up floppy drive, do you think it would be possible to install Linux via this connection onto the laptop HD?
My desktop is a G4 Mac running OS 10.4.

Long and confusing question, sorry, but any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated...

 

Wow. That sounds like a serious task at hand. Well, I think there are a few issues. Installing Linux on a Mac is different than installing it on a PC.

Second, a USB to Serial converter is possible...I have seen them. You will not be able to connect a desktop (to my knowledge) via the serial connection used for an external floppy drive. Also, usually external floppies have proprietary connections to the notebooks.

I had this situation ages ago on a very primitive Thinkpad that didn't have a built in optical drive. My solution, after much struggle, was to buy an external USB optical drive that could be booted to via a third-party program through DOS. I wouldn't know how this is done anymore (since I did this years ago). Modern notebooks have BIOS configurations that allow you to boot into USB directly.

 

You can still make changes to the bios even though the CMOS battery is dead. It just won't save the changes when you power off. I don't see why the laptop would not boot from cd after you have changed the bios settings. Just don't power off

 

I've got an usb to serial connection, they are rare but u can get them.

BENDER is right about the bios, you can still make changes even when there is no battery in there. Unless your bios is corrupted you should still be able to make the change.

If it all fails just get a pcmcia floppy, usually old bios always have boot floppy first.

No: If I was to attach my desktop computer (via USB) to the serial port that is used for the start-up floppy drive, do you think it would be possible to install Linux via this connection onto the laptop HD?

 

What you could do at this point is wait for the battery to arrive and try if you can reboot it and see if you can boot from the CD. Live CDs usually do the trick.

Onoze, Bender quoted me after the edit ¯\(º o)/¯

 

It should not reset after restart. If there's still juice flowing, the bios will keep the changes in memory. Only when you power it off that the bios loses the changes.