Yeah, so me getting Mandriva onto my Eee has a funny story behind it. The eeeUser wiki gave me a few options:
- Use a network connection to download all necessary packages for installation while leaving the 11MB installer on a small flash drive/SD card. I couldn't do that because of how the network is set up here (I need a browser to log in)
- Use an 8GB+ flash drive and put the DVD ISO on that, then put the 11MB installer on a small flash drive/SD card. I don't have an 8GB+ flash drive
- Use an external DVD drive. I couldn't get my SATA DVD drive to work with my SATA-USB converter which I ripped out of an external HDD.
So I made my own option: I downloaded the DVD ISO, put it at the root of my Windows partition on my desktop, then shut down the computer, took out the hard drive, and connected it to the SATA-USB converter. It worked, but I couldn't use either of my computers for about 4 hours.
Luckily, I could hang out with people in my hall, and a lot of us watched Transporter 2 in HD on a 40" TV that someone got from his brother, so that was pretty cool.
Once the installation finished, when I booted up I noticed Debian and Vista in the GRUB menu. At first I thought the installer fucked up, then I realized that it picked up the OS's that my desktop uses while it was installing.