I need help reformating laptop with win98

[derek]

I am trying to reformat my girlfirneds old laptop. It is an old dell p2. It has one drive port and she has a removable cdrom and removable floppy, but only one can be used at a time. How can I reformat it? I know I can reformat it but when reinstalling windows you need both at the same time? You need to boot from the foppy in order to start the installation process. I know if I put winxp on there it will be fine, but I don't think the laptop will do that well with winxp.

 

[daddiebigbig]

what are the specs

 

[Richard98]

Originally posted by: derek
I am trying to reformat my girlfirneds old laptop. It is an old dell p2. It has one drive port and she has a removable cdrom and removable floppy, but only one can be used at a time. How can I reformat it? I know I can reformat it but when reinstalling windows you need both at the same time? You need to boot from the foppy in order to start the installation process. I know if I put winxp on there it will be fine, but I don't think the laptop will do that well with winxp.

Are you sure that you need both the floppy and the CD? It's been ahwile since I've installed Win98, but I'm fairly sure that my CD is bootable.

 

[johnjkr1]

Well, ive had a similar issue with my old dell P2. Simple solution. Most 98 cd's are not bootable. But the floppy drive has a special connector you can use so you can have both the CDROM and the floppy work at the same time. Ask her to dig around and find it, it plugs into the parallel port. If you can't find it, I might have one you can borrow. You might try using the floppy to format and partition, then try it with the cdrom to see if it is bootable, some of the dell cd's were.

 

[derek]

Well I decided to just try and install winxp and see how it went. M girlfriend didn't have that cable and I have never seen a bootable copy of win98. The computer is running suprisingly well. Thanks for advice.

 

[Abhi]

There was another way...

Make a simple dos boot CD using nero...

Then pop in the Win98 install cd and install ...

 

[Zelmo3]

Or my preferred method is to have another partition for archived software, including the whole Win98 CD, and install from that when needed.

 

[johnjkr1]

Old Dell P2 laptops don't have hard drives big enough to archive anything...mine sure don't...good idea otherwise.