Ok, So I got this laptop that is really really old from a lady whose computer I'm working on. It had Win95 on it but it was crowded with junk programs and only had about 100 megs of open space on the hard drive. I decided the best option would be to format and install Windows 98. However after I rebooted with the floppy drive and had already formated, I realized there was only one bay and only the floppy drive or the cd-rom can be in at once.... I have no other access to a different floppy drive. Is there any way to copy the files from the Windows 98 startup floppy disk to the harddrive in such a manner that it would boot up using the win98 startup cd-rom drivers? (i know the copy command in DOS, but when I just copied the files over it didn't start up from the C: drive) If not is there any other way for me to solve my problem?

You could pick up a laptop adapter kit for about 8 bucks. This will let you swap the laptop hardrive into a desktop comptuter and you can copy the files you need onto the hard drive from there. The way I did it was to use the command: c:\md win98. That makes a new directory on your C drive and names it win98. Then put the cd rom in the drive and use the command: copy (put cd rom drive letter here):\win98 C:\win98. This should copy over 101 files needed. Then you can swap it back into the laptop and use the floppy boot disk and start with no cd rom support. Then use the command: C:\win98\setup.exe to install windows 98.

Mesich has a How-To on his website that will help here: HOW TO LOAD WINDOWS ON COMPUTER WITH SWAPABLE CD-ROM AND FLOPPY HTH Dave

Dave I have an old ThinkPad laptop and it has a swappable cd rom for it. Unfortunately there is no way to give it an option to boot from it, even if you install the drivers on the hard drive first. My bios options are: Floppy 1 Floppy 2 Hard Drive 1 Hard Drive 2 Hard Drive 3 PCMCIA card Network LAN And no the Floppy 2 does not mean a cd rom because the cd rom has it's own icon in the bios under the testing section. You can test it but you cannot boot from it. So that is why I gave him the directions I did. He said it was an old one so I assumed like mine it would not have a cd rom boot option on it.

Hi All, You do not need to boot from the CD-Rom or the floppy. The hard drive has the system files and you would boot to it. The cd-rom drivers would be loaded via the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Mesich

Dude Mesich you're the man.... thanks dude

Hi Trey, You are very welcome. Thanks Dave357 and Terri. Mesich