HD Install :: hd install with out extraction?

I am thinking about setting up DSL on the hd of one of my old 486 boxes. I've plugged a cd drive into it, and was really impressed with the level of usability for being such an old machine. Anyway, along with the numerous 486s I have in my shed, are numerous small harddrives, and what I want to do is set up the 486 to boot off of it's own hard drive, probably 120-200 meg depending on the machine, with the iso file on the hd, and the rest of the hd set to a swap partition and maybe a small user partition. Is this doable? I know just enough about linux to be dangerous at this point...

Yes it is, basically you copy the CD to the HD and then use a boot disk to boot it. It's already been discussed on here so search the forum.

Simple, copy KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX off the CD to a directory called KNOPPIX on the hard drive. Then just dd KNOPPIX/boot.img onto a floppy and boot from there.

Make sure that your C: drive directory is C:\KNOPPIX

in ALL-UPPERCASE letters.

Linux is case sensitive

original here.