I have a laptop with swappable cd and floppy drives. I made the boot floppies in setup and that was fine, but after I got to the 3rd floppy, it gave me the message it couldn't detect a cd rom drive and it closed setup. Can someone help?

If you have a partition creating program or better yet the Windows 98 bootdisk, you can use it to create two partitions. Make the first partition a bootable (system) DOS partition of about 800 MB. Copy the contents of the three NT boot floppies to the C: drive, insert your cd drive, change your BIOS to boot from the hard drive first then run the setup.exe from the hard drive. This should work.

What about booting directly from your CD-ROM ?

The CDROM isn't bootable. I'll try what zachary suggested, but I don't think it'll work. Any other suggestions?

Copying the 3 floppies to the Primary will not work... Copying the i386 and running setup from the Primary will work - but, for the moment, you cannot access the CDROM, so...

Essentially you could: create a smallish fat16 Primary partition (via a '98 bootdisk - with no large drive support enabled). It could be around 250Meg - max of 500Meg.

Make this primary bootable and install the standard CDROM drivers to it. Then when you replace the floppy-drive unit with the CD (swappable) unit, you should be able to boot and access the CDROM? Presuming so, then copy the i386 from the CD to the Primary aprtition. NT setup can then be run from the drive... - no need of either NT floppies or the CD.

A more detailed how to go about the above (accessing the CDROM) was detailed a while back by "Krystyna" - and Mesich/The Count have preserved it on their site at:

http://www.mesich.com

- under the "how to" section - specifically "load windows with swappable drives".

Saves me going thru' it all in more detail - all credit to Krystyna (and Mesich/The count for preserving it).

NT can be installed to that "smallish" Primary - or straight to the balance of drive. If the latter (to the balance of the drive) then you could create the Extended partition in advance via the '98 boot-disk - with large-drive support enabled - but do NOT preformat it; NT setup will create/format its own logical-drive (4Gig max be it fat16/ntfs4) within the established Extended (unformatted) partition. Or you can just create the Primary as above (and not bother to preconfigure the Extended partition) and allow NT setup to create its own 4Gig max (fat16/ntfs) logical-drive in the unconfigured space on the drive. The balance of drive not used for the NT installation can be configured/formatted afterwards via NT Disk Admmin tools.

A variation: you can make the Primary upto 2Gig fat16 and install NT there with apps/utils etc.

In both the above approaches you end up with a dual-boot, dos/NT - in a 2Gig max fat16 Primary. Balance of drive is again configured/formatted via NT disk Admin tools.

Or you can leave the Primary = 250Meg-500Meg and then install NT (only) there. Once NT is in the (smallish) Primary you can use NT Disk Admin to configure the balance of the drive as an Extended partition. It can then be subdivided into two or more logical-drives - one for NT itself (NT will be re-installed here afresh) and one for data. You then (re-)install NT to the Extended-partition/logical-drive (as ntfs or fat16). You can have the NT boot-partition (where the system files reside) in an Extended-partition/logical-drive upto 4Gig max as fat16 (or ntfs), or in excess of 4Gig as ntfs only.

When you (re-)install NT to the Extended partition area you will have a triple boot - dos (as originally on the drive) plus NT on the Primary and NT again - on the Extended partition. You can keep or delete NT in the Primary; personally I'd keep it. Keeping it allows you recovery options in the event that (main) version in the Extended area goes down...?

Hope this not too confusing...