Installing without CD drive.

[Cannedbread]

i am a hardcore newbie when it comes to linux. so you may have to talk down to me.

I would like to install gentoo on my laptop, from which i am writing this.
it is a 1.1ghz p3 with 512mbs of ram and a 30 gb hard drive.
I have it loaded with windows XP home edition but i am ready to format
it and load linux. I would prefer to do a level 1 install (full compile).

The main problem is that my CD drive is broken.
I have a USB floppy drive but im not sure if i can boot from it.

My Questions:

It supports network booting, can this be used?

I have an ipod, can i somehow mount that as a drive and copy the needed info from it?

I was installing IPcop linux on another box, and it had an option to boot from a floppy that would download the rest of the data from a networked ftp server, does gentoo have something similar?

What if i take the hard drive out, put it in another computer, and copy the files to it from there?

Without getting a new CD drive, how do you propose i go about doing this?

Thanks for your help,
-Cameron

[mens]

I suggest you copy the stage1 cd to your harddisk (over the network) and then use loadlin (http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/) to boot into linux. If your network device is detected by the installer, you can then copy anything you want from the network/internet and format your drives.