Hi i recently recieved a ibm 760 ed thinkpad laptop and i wanted to clean it out and reinstall windows 98 se on it (dont ask why) So the problem i am having is that i reformated the hd i dos expecting to get a prompt afterward and accessing my cd drive to install 98 from dos. the problem is that it didnt recognize the d drive or any drive for that matter as a cd-rom, i know the cd rom works so i tried restarting and then possibly booting off of a boot cd but the bios doesnt have an option to boot of the cd drive and i dont have a flopy drive with the computer so basically i have no way or atleast i cat think of any way to initialize the cd-rom to install win 98 without getting a laptop floppy drive (it can boot off of lan, how does that work?)

Every bios should have option that lets you change the boot order of your drives, I havent worked with laptops but from the desktops I have seen all of them has some list or another way to show what is the primary boot device, You should be able to change the primary boot device to the CD room some how int he bios.

i know, it should be that way but my guess is that the laptop is 2 old for that because it doesnt allow me to set the cd as a boot drive just floppy 1 floppy 2 hdd1 hdd2 pcmcia and network or lan any other ideas?

You can remove the hard drive and connect it to a desktop with an inexpensive adapter. Copy the win98 folder from the install CD to the hard drive. Restore the drive to the laptop and run the install from the win98 folder. Then comes the problem of locating all the drivers.

How did you reformat the hard drive if you have no floppy drive ???

If you follow Ham's advice, don't forget to run the dos command 'sys' first to make the drive bootable.