Lap Top with no operating system

[firex]

Ill start from the begining, I have a gateway laptop with windows 98se, it was starting to run slow so i formated the hard drive to do a reinstall, when i went to reload windows i found out the cd rom drive no longer works, so now i cant reinstall....what I need to do is reinstall windows through my home network...this is what i have, i just need to know how to set it up to load all the windows 98 files on the laptop....


LAPTOP= p2-233 with usb, no operating system but I have a win 98 boot disk and a usb network card

MAIN MACHINE=xp1600 with win xp installed to a router and a hub network working with my I-BOOK , win 98 disk copied to sharing folder on my windows machine, and file sharing enabled, how can I get the notebook to work with my network with no os installed...thanks

 

[Woodchuck2000]

I'm afraid you have very little chance of getting a USB network adaptor to load in dos. If you can get your hands on a PCMCIA card it's possible.
Go to Nu2.Nu for information on booting to the network from a floppy.

 

[Jeff7]

Or buy a new CD-drive for it somewhere, maybe on the FS/T forum here; just post a WTB (want to buy) thread. A computer without a CD-ROM drive of some sort is not very useful these days.

 

[mboy]

Does it nor work as it is broken? or can the macjine not find it becasue of the drivers? I had same problem in old Dell peice of junk laptop, found the DOs drivers (after may calls to tech support, finally found them on my own online).

 

[Soybomb]

Don't both with the network install, it would be pretty difficult. If you don't already have one pick up a 2.5" hard drive adapter for about $5 and put the hard drive in your desktop, make the drive bootable with "sys", now copy all the cab files over. Pop it back in the laptop and it will boot to a command prompt, now start yoursetup. That would be the quickest and easiest way.