How do I load Windows 98?

[top_stealthman]

How do I load Windows 98 on a laptop that had no operating system loaded on it (fdisk has been performed) if the floppy drive and the cd-rom drive share the same bay? If I try to boot up with the cd-rom drive plugged in, I get a non system disk error and the laptop stops. If I restart with a boot disk in the floppy drive, the laptop can't find the cd-rom drive because it's not plugged in so I can't load Windows. I tried ms-dos 6.0 but it only supports fat16 partitioning and I loose part of my hard drive capacity. I really don't want to have my hard drive broken up into different partitions (I want Windows98 running with a C: drive with my full hard drive capacity). Can anyone offer any suggestions that doesn't include buying MS-Dos 7.0?

[GretaP]

Hi top_stealthman,
If the laptop's BIOS suppports booting from CDROM, and you have access to another computer that has both a CD burner and a floppy drive, you can create a bootable CD and then copy the files from a WIN98 startup floppy disk to that bootable CD. Set the laptop's boot order in BIOS to boot from CDROM (have the bootable startup CD in the drive). It will boot up as if booting from WIN98 startup floppy disk (i.e., will boot to an A: prompt and load DOS drivers for the CDROM drive).