Were I in your situation, I'd remove the hard drive from the laptop, use a 
2.5" to 3.5" hard drive converter (which are available, I believe, for 
BOTH standard IDE/ATA and SCSI laptop driveS), and plug it into a desktop 
for installation...

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Emil wrote:

> Hi.
> I've recently come into possession of a Toshiba Satellite 105c, and I'm 
> trying to install NetBSD on it.  However, the machine has no CD-drive, and 
> the boot floppy image in the i386/installation/floppy/ directory doesn't 
> seem to recognize the external one I've got plugged in to the parallel 
> port. (I'm using bootlap1.fs and bootlap2.fs)
> 
> My initial plan was to chop the kernel into the 235k chunks, but sysinst 
> wants ten pieces out of a 1.95 meg file, and that just won't cut it.  I 
> tried cutting it into smaller pieces, but then base.tgz has more pieces 
> than sysinst wants.
> 
> So my question is this:  What can I do to access the external CD drive?
> Or possibly:  Is there a way to trick sysinst into believing I've given it 
> everything it wants without having parts of the kernel and system missing?
> 
> --Emil
>