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Dell laptop/busted CD player/reinstall windows

M

moemac8

Member
Ok, my bosses Dell has a busted CD player. The floppy drive can replace the CD player and it still works. She bought a external CD player for it. The hard drive is so full of crap, spyware and viruses, the machine barely boots up and then it is so super slow, just moving the mouse across the screen takes minutes. I need to some how reformat the harddrive and reinstall Windows 98 on it.

How the heck do you do that if the CD player is boinked???

The external CD player can't be set as a boot device in the bios, it never shows up. I figure it is because the laptop is so old.

Anyone have any suggestions or is the only solution to buy a new CD player from Dell??
 
Take the hdd out, put the i386 directory from the cd onto the hdd from another computer, use boot up floppies to launch the installer from the hdd.
 
Madthumbs, that's the wrong directory for Win98.

MOEMAC8: You can boot with a Win98 Emergency Floppy, make sure to select the menu option that loads the DOS CD-Rom drivers, then browse the CD from the DOS prompt and run SETUP.EXE

You probably want to run FDISK first and nuke the partition then create a new one.

You can also copy the entire \WIN98 folder from the CD to the hard drive and then execute the SETUP.EXE file from there.

HOWEVER, considering this laptop sounds like a dinosaur, why don't you convince your boss to buy a budget Dell laptop? You can get one for less than $600.

 
FlyingPenguin,
As far as a new notebook, its not going to happen. She gave the notebook to her mother to use with a embrodery program. She wont buy her a new one, lol. It is a dinosaur, 733mhz P3, but it still works good and has alot of ram. I looked on the Dell website and cant even find a replacement CD for it.

Will Windows 98 boot floppy even see a usb CD-ROM??

I guess I can partition the HD and and copy the files over to the new D: drive then boot to a floppy, Fdisk then run the exe from D:
 
As long as the USB CD drive is detectable by BIOS, then DOS should see it if you boot with DOS CD Rom drivers.

Yes, your second idea would also work. Repartition the drive to add a 2nd partition at least 700Mb in size and format it (you'll need something like partition magic). From Windows copy the entire \WIN98 folder from the 98 CD to the new partition. Nuke the C partition and then create a new one and format it. Boot with the 98 Emergency floppy, go to the \Win98 folder on the 2nd partition and run SETUP.EXE inside that folder.

You may find a replacement CD drive here:
http://www.laptopsforless.com/index.html

or here:

http://www.pcsurplusonline.com

Hope this helps...
 
OK, here is how I got it done. The bios never would let me boot off the usb CD-Rom. I did however find USB drivers for the CD-Rom and I made a boot floppy with the drivers on it so I could see the Windows CD. I had to delete stuff off the boot floppy to fit the CD-Rom driver on so I have to boot to a complete Windows floppy to reformat the HD, then boot up the special CD-Rom dos driver floppy to install the OS.

Thanks for your help and suggestions. And thanks for the link to a site to buy a replecment CD for the laptop.

Oh, FP, nice personal website....I am an old fart too. I hang out with a bunch of old farts in City of Heroes, there are alot of us out there.
 
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