This is neat, i think i have a laptop with a 486 somewhere around here so i might try this at some point. The only trouble is that said laptop only has infrared for I/O (not even floppy) :-P. Also i have one with a Pentium although that is a bit faster, obviously.
However i wonder if it would be faster if you went with a Linux From Scratch-like approach and used some lightweight init system and only installed minimal stuff - perhaps replacing the some of the more heavyweight GNU tools with alternatives from suckless [1].
I am in the same boat. I have a perfectly working Thinkpad 560E (Pentium) but no floppy or other adapter to really connect to it. I use it to play Doom but adding some other old games would be nice. Hm, come to think of it my old tablet has infrared, maybe i could send some files that way ...
But it first needs a working system installed. I never tried it (actually I did the opposite), but it should be possible to install a minimal system on a similar spec-ed virtual machine, then write the created disk image into a physical disk, stick it into the laptop and boot it.
It is the "write the created disk image into a physical disk" that is the hard bit though :-P. It has some tiny HDD. Although now that i think about it, i wonder if it can be used with another laptop that i have. That one only has a floppy disk, but it is still better than nothing.
Yes, probably. Linux isn't Windows and is deeply modular these days, to the point you can install a full system plus firmwares onto an AMD machine, then move the disk to an Intel one, or the other way around, and expect everything to work because drivers aren't hardcoded anywhere (there are exceptions, but they're rare) and the system loads what is needed for the hardware it finds at each boot. BUT, in a very small memory and storage constrained system one could be forced to recompile the kernel with just the bare necessary static drivers to make the hardware work, which could cause problems in different architectures.
Now that I think of it, there are on Ebay floppy "emulators" which offer a compatible floppy drive interface to the system but use flash memories as storage. They're made in slightly different versions to be compatible with different systems, including home computers and musical instruments. Might be a solution to a fast install through floppies without actually using floppies.
Also there are ATA to compact flash converters which are even cheaper because the two ports are about 100% compatible. I used the latter years ago to put a firewall (pfSense IIRC) compact flash into a small PC which had only ATA ports. Booted from it and worked without problems.
As far as I can figure out, it should be possible to copy files directly over a serial cable (to/from COM1 on dos, /dev/ttyS0 on Linux).
But for sanity, being able to fix a non-booting disk is recommended, so I'd probably try with a second-hand pcmcia hd, usb adapter or something like the above.
I also learned Ms dos comes with INTERLNK.EXE and INTERSVR.EXE - but I wasn't able to figure out if there's a sane way to talk to that from Linux.
However i wonder if it would be faster if you went with a Linux From Scratch-like approach and used some lightweight init system and only installed minimal stuff - perhaps replacing the some of the more heavyweight GNU tools with alternatives from suckless [1].
[1] https://core.suckless.org/