Installing Win98 off USB Cdrom

[Tsunami[04]]

Here's my problem: I had a laptop go belly up, with all kinds of explorer.exe and kernal errors. I think it was a result of a windows update, but that's another story. Anyway, windows 98 needs to be reinstalled, but the laptop is one of those that has no cdrom or floppy drive built it. The floppy drive is added through a propritary connection, but the cdrom is added by the USB port.

My problem is in trying to get the bootdisk to recognize the USB cdrom so that I can install off of it. I have the drivers for the cdrom available, and have tried using the mscdex command, but seem to be using it wrong. Can anyone offer me any advice or help on this? Thanks in advance! :)

[jdc2000]

Unless the laptop came with DOS USB drivers (unlikely - I have yet to see any of those), I don't think you will be able to get a boot disk to recognize the USB CD-ROM drive. If you have not formatted the hard drive, the CAB files for Windows may still be there somewhere. If they are, you can install using those. If not, you may end up removing the hard drive from the laptop, putting it in a desktop PC using an adapter, and copying the WIN98 folder from the CD to the hard drive. Then, you can put the hard drive back into the laptop and install Windows.

[AnnMarie]

Hi Tsunami[04] - welcome to CTH. You could try the USB drivers here (http://www.bootdisk.com/readme.htm). Scroll down to "USB CDrom In DOS - BETA"