Debian Installation Hell

[C_Principe at telesalesinc.com (C_Principe at telesalesinc.com)]

I have been having some fun lately trying to get Debian installed on my
computer.  First the background:

Compaq Presario 4/25 (read: old!) with no CD-ROM drive.  I used floppy
images to do the initial install, then grabbed the rest from the FTP site.
Recently, I got a NIC card and, not knowing anything about modconf or
something easy, I took the long route around of reinstalling the base
system again.  *Then* I couldn't get the NIC card to work, and I finally
got X running, so I decided to *reinstall* the base system again.  (This is
the proof of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.)
Anyway, I couldn't track down my original floppies, so I downloaded the
latest images from the Debian FTP site.  No matter what version I use, I
keep getting an error ("Error writing to disk: Success") that prematurely
aborts the loading of the base system and attempts to extract an incomplete
base2.1.tgz.  I am very frustrated with the floppy process and wondering
about CD-ROM solutions.

I am nervous about trying to hunt down an external CD-ROM because the
computer is so old.  I don't even believe it has a SCSI port on it.  I am
wondering if it is possible to take the hard drive that I have, and put it
temporarily into a computer that has a CD-ROM drive, and do the basic
installation on that computer.

Has anyone attempted this in the past?  Any suggestions/solutions?

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