Hey Sergey!

 SS> ¨¨¨¨¨ ¨¨ ¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Maurice Kinal (2:280/464.113) ¨ Sergey Sapronov, ¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ 10 ¨¨¨ 21 ¨ 09:02:

Easy for you to say.  ;-)

 SS> There is a CD-rom, but it does not read modern cd-r for some
 SS> unknown reason.

I am betting it is too fast a burn speed.  I hear 4x is the best speed for targetting older CD-ROMs.  Also CDs used to be 650M so that also might be an issue since I believe CDs are now 700M?  It's been awhile but I do remember that lower burn speeds made a big difference.

 SS> So far I have come to this option: I removed the HDD, connected
 SS> it via an IDE-2-USB adapter to a full-fledged laptop, created a
 SS> virtual machine with this physical disk through VMWare player on
 SS> it, and on this disk I plan to install Linux from an iso image,
 SS> and after installation, connect the hdd back to the old laptop

I used to do that without the virtual.  It worked great and was way faster than CD installs.  I still do it this way except with SSDs.

 SS> this is the design!

An excellent one.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Longa¨ ¨onne ¨y l‘s ¨e him con leo¨a worn.
    He is less troubled by longing who knows many songs.
--- GNU bash, version 5.1.8(1)-release (x86_64-moosile-linux-gnu)