I want to upgrade to Fedora Core 5, and I have tried to do so, but my cd drive is not very good and when installing FC4, I had to hit "retry" on a few of the packages, then it worked. However, with FC5, there is no "Retry" button, just a "reboot" button. Is there any way of doing this without buying a new drive?

copy the distro into a USB ext HDD and boot up using the device?

else just buy another cd-rom drive. its cheap anyway ;o)