Reviving an Old Laptop-No Floppy

[dudleydocker]

So I acquired an old Toshiba Pentium laptop from work, minus a floppy or CD-ROM drive. Lacking anyway practical way to clean it up (reformat) I?ve used it as is, with a pretty messed up W95 install. Well, I finally acquired a working CD-ROM drive. My question is what is the best way to go about a format/resinstall of W98? It only has a 2 GB hard drive, but I figure that I could load Partition Magic and create a second partition to copy the 98 set-up files. I also have an Adaptec PCMCIA SCSI adapter card to which I can connect my external Plextor 8/20 drive, now that I can finally load the drivers. So with two drives accessable this should be doable right? Just looking for some input before I do trash the only working OS on the PC. And no, the CD drive is not bootable. Thanks for any help/suggestions.

 

[dbwillis]

Well I did this one time with a lappy that only had a floppy drive:>
Boot into 95...then copy the win98 folder off the CD to the hard drive (same partition).
Then restart into DOS..then fdisk /mbr..then delete all the files/folders on the C drive EXCEPT the win98 folder form the CD you just copied onto the HDD.
If there are folders you cant delete..just rename them to JUNK001, JUNK002, etc.
Then run the install from the win98 folder and once your all back into the new OS, just delete the JUNK001, JUNK002 folders.
Should be all set..but it is a kinda roundabout way of doing it.

 

[bacillus]

if your win98 cd is bootable, you could fdisk & format without a floppy!

 

[dudleydocker]

I've messed around with the BIOS, and I can't boot from the CD otherwise this would be easy. Regarding FDISK/MBR, I have to admit that since first getting Partition Magic, my FDISK days ended! The FIDSK/MBR will delete just that file? Then I can reinstall from the WIN98 folder? I did sucessfully set up a second partition. Any benefit from copying the WIN98 folder there, then deleting the contents of the first partition (where everything is riht now) then running the install from Partition #2?

Thanks.