Hi there, I have just recently purchased a new/blank 14GB hard drive for my older model Compaq Armada laptop.I have also bought a new copy of Win98SE which I plan to install on the new hard drive. The problem, if I indeed have a problem, comes when I have to go to install the Win98. I have a swappable floppy/cd-rom drive port on this laptop but I have only the cd-rom drive. I have no floppy drive. The first step in the Installation process is to insert the "startup" disk that the Win98SE came with. Do I infact need this because I have heard that you could install it w/o a startup disk. Is this true? and if so why do they give people a startup disk? It would be great if anyone could answer this. Thank You. Mark_M.

You need to check the BIOS on your computer and see if it will boot from the CD-ROM and set it to do so, if possible. There may be an issue with the BIOS since Compaq has a habit of storing the BIOS settings on the hard drive. You may need to download a fix from the Compaq website to install this on the new drive before trying to load the operating system. If the machine can boot from the CD-ROM, you should have no problems.

Windows 98 and 98SE have the ability to boot up using only the cd. The only problem with this is that not all computers can do this. On the bright side, I have seen very few newer laptops that cannot boot off a CD because of the swappable CD and FDD. Just try putting the Win98SE CD in the drive and starting the computer. If this doesn't work, you may have to go into the BIOS and make the boot device order so that the CD-Rom is on top (or first). If all else fails, you could make your harddrive bootable with just the system files ("format c: /s") and then install the CD-Rom drivers via diskette. Then boot on your hard drive. Good luck with that, but your laptop should be able to do it. Keith

you could always just boot up with a win98 startup disk, partition and format the new drive and copy the startup disk to the new drive, then boot up with the cd installed. that way you would have dos commands to use when running setup. I had a old compaq armada 7700 series and I don't think it will boot from a cd, but I can't remember for sure.

A little correction. Not all Win98 CDs are bootable. If you use Steve's suggestion, after copying the files from the floppy to the hard drive, you will have to change all the references from A; to C:

if you have a desktop computer then you should get an adapter to hook up the lap top hadr drive to the desk top and the format it with sys install and drag the win 98 folder into the lap top drive, put the drive back in the lap top bootup and run the setup in the win98m folder, all done in dos.

Check out the link below. It will show you how to copy the system files and load the cd rom drivers then load Windows as Keith was speaking of above. LOAD WINDOWS WITH SWAPPABLE CD AND FLOPPY Good Day! Mesich