Hi, I have a laptop that was given to me that appears to be missing some things but still runs.When I start up it runs as follows: Press f10 for setup (which works fine if I do) Then copyright........ Win98 screen.......... After that it stops and says that there is no cd-rom device/driver detected and I am given a c prompt.. ??????? I have a win98 cd It has no cd-rom I have a good fast machine with a cd-rom and a mac and now this Compaq lte 5150 stuck. please help. I think it might be password locked as well. Thanks to all, The Natural

If it were password locked you wouldn't be able to press F10 and enter the BIOS. You would get instead a screen to enter the password and that is all you would ever get if the password wasn't the right one. Only other password is in Windows and it appears that you don't have windows installed even if you do see a flash of the windows screen. This can be normal. It sounds like somebody tried to install 98 and only got that far. This may be due to some very hard problems to get around. Laptops as a rule use a Restore CD to install Windows because laptops require special drivers for their special hardware and an off the shelf 98 CD will NEVER work in this case. I don't know if this is your case or not, I also don't know where to go to find out. You might try Compaq to see about availablility and price for a Restore CD for your model. And a CD drive? Investigate LapLink as a means to get the 98 (restore CD?) install files onto the laptop using DOS and a parallel or serial cable link to your other computer that can host the CD files. LapLink 4 was free and if you spend enough time looking you can still find it. You should spend a little more time learning about DOS and what to do with a C:\> prompt as well - you might find some files already on there with: directory /all /verbose dir /a /v change directory to windows directory cd windows change directory to root cd\ go back one in directory chain cd.. It would appear that the somebody who tried to install 98 either removed the CD drive or wasn't to bright as they installed a CD driver which is now complaining that there is no CD drive to work with? Some lessons in DOS would help you to remove the driver and thus the error message. Unless... your description of what it does when booted is because of booting with the 98 floppy startup disk which may be in your laptop's A: drive? If so, remove it and reboot - now what happens?

Thanks for all of your time... I don't have a 98 floppy....I'll try to use my machine as a host and see what happens. Thanks

when i use dos and type cd-windows it says invalid directory

Your welcome. Then it's likely that there are no Windows install files already there. Default folder for those is C:\windows\options\cabs. A dir /a command from the root C:\> prompt should then show: io.sys msdos.sys command.com and maybe drvspace.bin config.sys> these are responsible for autoexec.bat> no CDROM message? oakcdrom.sys> If so, then somebody used the Sys.com command on the hard drive to transfer the system files from a floppy so it could boot. That's about all you CAN do until you install the laplink software, transfer the CDROM:\Win98 cab install files, and proceed to install 98. You can download a 98 bootdisk self-extracting file from Bootdisk.com. Double click the download and pop a floppy in on any machine. They also have a section on getting CDROM support onto a hard drive - you'll need to learn how in order to remove that error message. double check - you posted: cd-windows the command is: cd windows exactly, no hyphen, one space.

i found a great article describing how to install win98 from scratch on a toshiba laptop with no cd or floppy, but the general procedure should apply to you (it worked for me): http://www.ids.org.au/~shaynest/articles/portege/ you do, however, need access to a functioning desktop PC with CD and floppy drives, the confidence to take out your laptop's hard drive and an adaptor that will allow you to attach your 2.5" laptop drive to the the 3.5" desktop connector. there are a couple of typos in the method described that may not be obvious if you are unfamiliar with DOS, most importantly you should copy the win98 files with the command copy e:\win98\*.* c:\windows\cabs you also need to know the commands md to make a directory and cd to change directory. before copying the win98 files you may need to make the windows\cabs directory. type md c:\windows cd c:\windows md c:\windows\cabs it is also a very good idea (which i only figured out at the second attempt) to round up every driver you can find for your laptop hardware - from manufacturer's sites etc - and transfer these to a folder you create on the laptop disk after copying the win 98 system. then you can install the laptop-specific hardware (modems, display drivers, pci bridge, whatever) without needing the cd. it's quite a hassle though, and takes time...

Hi there! I wrote the tutorial on installing the Portege from scratch, here: http://www.ids.org.au/~shaynest/articles/portege/ Thank you w_i_l_l for pointing out the errors in the article. I have just done an overhaul of that page and hopefully things are a little clearer. I have added your commands for creating directories in DOS. I have also more clearly separated the installation methods, including connecting the notebook drive as a secondary drive (and using 3rd part disk software) to avoid the sometimes scary process of using FDISK! Please let me know of errors on the page or any other information to add. I can be emailed at mattan (at) mattan dot org. Also, the article can be permanently accessed in the 'Articles' section at: http://www.mattan.org/ (the other link will still work, but in the future I may change web hosts). Regards, mattan.