I have a Dell Pentium laptop with a CD drive but no Floppy drive. I need to reinstall 98SE and have a Dell Reinstall CD. The CD has no bootable file to install. Since I have no floppy drive, how can I install the OS? The HD was f-disked prior to starting. Thanks for your help!
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Re-install 98SE without Floppy Drive
- Thread starter pintail
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diogenes10
Technical User
I would have thought the dell cd was bootable.
You've tried changing boot device order in bios to a choice that has cd first, and then attempted to boot from the cd?
You've tried changing boot device order in bios to a choice that has cd first, and then attempted to boot from the cd?
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- #3
diogenes10
Technical User
Im not sure specifically how to direct you, some thoughts for consideration, maybe something will be helpful.
1) On ebay I also see system utility disks as well as operating system disks. If you have that disk for your system, maybe it's bootable and you could get started that way. (also, I dont know if "dell" win98 is different than a microsoft 98 cd, if you have a microsoft win98 cd you could try booting the system with that.)
2) If the harddrive removes easily, you could consider getting an adaptor kit and putting it in a desktop as a slave, booting the desktop with a win98 bootdisk and then copying the win98 directory from the win98 cd, put the drive back in the laptop and go from there. (I have done this general concept with win95.)
3) I was cleaning up my computer the other day and I found this site reference - I've not waded through it and I suspect it takes at least some files on the system, but I pass it along for whatever it's worth.
4) If the harddrive does not remove easily you could consider making a boot cd with the win98 boot disk info
( if you dont have one). I've never done this so I cant comment on how well/poorly the attached comments/instructions work.
If you also put the win98 directory on the boot cd, you could then copy it to the harddrive after you formatted it.
The best optimizer is between your ears.
M. Abrash
1) On ebay I also see system utility disks as well as operating system disks. If you have that disk for your system, maybe it's bootable and you could get started that way. (also, I dont know if "dell" win98 is different than a microsoft 98 cd, if you have a microsoft win98 cd you could try booting the system with that.)
2) If the harddrive removes easily, you could consider getting an adaptor kit and putting it in a desktop as a slave, booting the desktop with a win98 bootdisk and then copying the win98 directory from the win98 cd, put the drive back in the laptop and go from there. (I have done this general concept with win95.)
3) I was cleaning up my computer the other day and I found this site reference - I've not waded through it and I suspect it takes at least some files on the system, but I pass it along for whatever it's worth.
4) If the harddrive does not remove easily you could consider making a boot cd with the win98 boot disk info
( if you dont have one). I've never done this so I cant comment on how well/poorly the attached comments/instructions work.
If you also put the win98 directory on the boot cd, you could then copy it to the harddrive after you formatted it.
The best optimizer is between your ears.
M. Abrash
Does the dell disk just restore machine to 'factory state'? (rather than actually installing windows). If it needs to boot from a floppy to start the process, 2 suggestions:-
1. Borrow (I presume you don't intend buying) a floppy drive to use.
2. Don't know if this approach viable (comes from playing about making bootable CD's). You should be able to make an image of the dell bootable floppy disk (using something like winimage). If you write this image to a blank CD - but don't finalise CD), then write the contents of the dell CD to it too, you should have a bootable CD. This should behave like the floppy, but also treat the rest of the CD as a CD (I did something like this with a win98 boot floppy image and some other data) - so hopefully it would do the recovery. As I said I've no idea if this will work - just a suggestion.
1. Borrow (I presume you don't intend buying) a floppy drive to use.
2. Don't know if this approach viable (comes from playing about making bootable CD's). You should be able to make an image of the dell bootable floppy disk (using something like winimage). If you write this image to a blank CD - but don't finalise CD), then write the contents of the dell CD to it too, you should have a bootable CD. This should behave like the floppy, but also treat the rest of the CD as a CD (I did something like this with a win98 boot floppy image and some other data) - so hopefully it would do the recovery. As I said I've no idea if this will work - just a suggestion.
- Thread starter
- #6
Thanks diogenesis10 and wolluf! Luck of the Iris I guess. A friend was reading my post and said he had a full version 98SE MS CD and even burned me a CD with the necessary boot files. I find the referenced links very interesting, especially nu2. I have bookmarked it and may find use of it later. Again, many thanks. For the hallibut, I plan to try your suggestions to see how they work even though I am up and running again. (Just a curious cat here 
)
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