I have Dell Cpi P266 laptop that needs to have it's drive reformated. I have done this before on a desktop but not on a laptop with swapable floppy and CD drive. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reload my Win98 CD after I format my harddrive. I was thinking I should get an external parallel CD drive so I can have both a floppy and a CD attached at the same time.

go into the bios and change to have the CD to be bootable. Then when it starts, it'll default ot the cd. You cna then just run setup from the cd.

My advice is not to format. Copy the Win98 folder from the CD to the Hard drive. Then delete the 'Windows', "Program Files' folders and anything else that you want to get rid of. This is practically the same as doing a format. Boot from a floppy and run the install from the Win98 folder on the hard drive.

Hi Chris Firstly, you need a copy of your CD-ROM driver ( probably named ATAPICD.SYS ) and a copy of MSCDEX.exe ( located in C:\Windows\Command ) Then, before you format, go into DOS and make a bootable floppy. At the C:\ prompt, type Format a: /s Then copy ATAPICD.SYS and MSCDEX.exe to this floppy. Then create a CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT file ( you can do this in Notepad in Windows ) Very simple one line files - AUTOEXEC.BAT will say C:\MSCDEX.exe /D:MSCD001 CONFIG.SYS will say DEVICE=C:\ATAPICD.SYS /D:MSCD001 Copy both of these files to your new floppy disk. You could also add format and fdisk to the floppy. After formatting your hard drive, reboot with this new floppy ( you will get error messages about the CD-ROM, but ignore them ) and then copy these 4 files to the C:\ drive ATAPICD.SYS MSCDEX.EXE CONFIG.SYS AUTOEXEC.BAT Remove the floppy disk, turn off the laptop, and put in the CD-ROM pack. Turn on the computer and it should boot to C:\ and you should be able to change to D:\ drive for the Cd-ROM. This always works for me when I need to format and reinstall on a laptop that can only have one or the other of a floppy or CD-ROM. Good luck...Krystyna ( Email me if you get stuck )