Hi My friend recently picked up a really old, slow laptop. It had WIn95 on it and he decided he wanted win98. So he formatted the hard drive and now he has a problem.... the cdrom drive and floppy drive have to be swapped out for each other to use them and so he can't install anything. If he boots with the windows boot disk, it can't install the cdrom drivers cuz the cd drive can't be detected cuz it's not there (the floppy is in it's place). It can't boot from the cdrom drive cuz it's too old and it's not in the BIOS. When he try's to boot from the HD, he gets invalid system disk cuz he formatted it. Now I don't know what to tell him, I thought if he installed a version of DOS, it might have the cdrom drives with it, but we can't find a version of DOS. If anybody has any ideas that might help us out, we would really appreciate it! Thanks! Homer

First of all, DOS does not contain cd drivers so don't look there. Next, if you look to the left you will see the word Howtos. It'll take you to advanced howtos and you end up here: http://computing.net/howto/advanced/laptopinstall/ Follow the instructions.

On my PowerLoad pages I have basic DOS Bootdisks with FDISK, FORMAT & SYS on them, you will also find basic DOS CD-ROM Drivers. Follow the lead Skip gave you, and if you need the Bootdisk and/or CD-ROM Driver, you know where to get them!

fer xx sake don't tell us what brand or model of laptop this thing is. Have you been to the website of whoever manufactured the thing? You may just find some help there. Some of the IBM thinkpads, for example, have hot swappable drives.