Tim:
I'm curious how you installed it in the first place, then?
home user:
That was about 11 years ago, so my memory of that is foggy and incomplete.
I installed windows-7 first, probably from a CD purchased from a local (near Washington, D.C) store.
Then using either a CD burned by a co-worker who was a sys. admin. (most likely), or a CD that came with a thick paperback introductory sys. admin. book, or a CD that I burned from windows, I installed Fedora. It took a few tries. Then one day the installation process just worked (seemingly like magic). That's all that I recall.
You can run live versions from a disc. Does the computer only have a CD drive, or does it have a DVD? CD-only would make it hard.
I still have one ancient motherboard that cannot boot from USB sticks. It's only options for USB booting are USB floppy and USB zip drives, neither of which like USB anything else. It's also an extremely useless motherboard, small RAM size, and without SATA ports, so I don't really care.
I did reinstall Win98 on it last year just for self-torture reasons. It was even dreadful at that.