Instaling Windows or anythign on Dell CPT laptop

[Nutkin]

I got a dell laptop and the hard drive is formatted and i need to install windows or linux or any operating system on it. the cd rom drive doesnt seen to run bootable cds, i have already selected boot from cd in bios. i can get the win 98 boot disk to fire up and everything but i can only have one drive in at a time could someone please help

[ktkendall]

I remember one option for that scenario was to get ahold of an external floppy drive for the installation process.

[Nutkin]

EXTERNAL where might i get one of them

[ktkendall]

You can buy them but I would hate to see you have to do that just for this one install. Most of what I am seeing are USB external floppy drives and you may get a hard time booting from that anyways. My old laptop had one that connected to the serial port, but I'm not seeing those around anymore. If you jsut knew someone to borrow one from, or If you think it's something to invest in, search some computer component sites and see what they have. I once did what you need to do by using the floppy win98 boot disk, and formatting my harddrive with format C: /sys, and also copying those standard cdrom drivers over also so that I made my harddrive bootable and it was exactly like booting from the win98 boot floppy where you get that option menu for with or without cdrom support. I don't remember all the details of how I did it but I just remember having to change a something from A: to C: on one of the lines either the config.sys or bat file. Then I simply was able to boot the computer put the CDROM in and I do believe the cdrom becomes E: in that case because of the virtual ram drive that the boot program creates is D:, so I was able to run E: setup. I do know this will only work with win98 though because you can not run winXP setup from dos environment..