New laptop HD

[cyn <cyn@cyn.org>]

I've recently acquired a new larger hard drive for my laptop - and am
pondering the best way to do a reinstall.  (sony picturebook, I have had
to use debian 2.1 disks in the past because I had to get through
everything but drivers and base system (they were on a vfat partition).
Is there any way to use a dos boot disk (thus gaining access to my pcmcia
cdrom) and then loadlin and the likes to do a cd-install, or will that not
work because the second the kernel takes over it will stop looking for the
cdrom the way dos did?

Also, I am curious on how to recreate the suspend partition.  I seem to
recall some people mentioning that doing a simple fdisk under dos will
recreate it properly - but I just don't have that much faith in dos fdisk.
This is going from 4gigs to 10gigs by the way, and I have this frightened
feeling that the bios will want it at 64ish megs before the 8gig mark.
(think it also wants video, could be wrong on that, which would bring it
to 66.5)

and naturally, I've been reading the debian weekly newsletters, and am
curious how close 3.0 is - I don't know whether they support usb floppy
drives in their floppy sets of this (or perhaps the 2nd or 3rd cd might
have disks for this).  Even if they don't, I would be willing to roll a
custom kernel and jump through the hoops if need be just to install 3.0
when it comes out - it'd be nice to have a real fresh new system.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I do have a 2.5->3.5 ide adaptor so
doing the install on the desktop is definately a possibility - but I do
very much have to deal with the suspend partition issue first.  I am
also contemplating just using PowerQuests DriveImage to restore
everything in, but again that needs the suspend partition :)
and of course - all my critical and personal laptop's files are rsynched
in case I just go the reinstall route.

Summary:
how do i properly create the suspend partition 4gig->100gig?
can you use a dos boot disk + loadlin to access pcmcia cdrom for install?
when's 3.0 coming! :) ?
how glad am I that I have the 2.5->3.5 adapter? (don't gotta answer this
	one).

Thanks a bunch, this list seems to try its best to be very helpful.
-Martin