Any way around a failed disc drive?

[bjamesw]

Hello,
New to the board. I have a four year old toshiba laptop with disc transport that doesn't seem to want to spin up the disc. The laptop isn't valuable enough to have serviced, but is very handy to use for asides, on the road, etc. At present it has no operating system installed. Is it possible to get enough of windows 98 installed thru floppies to get the computer to recognize a usb connection? Or can anyone suggest another method to work around the cd transport? I have other laptops. Any other method to get windows 98 installed?
Thank you for any advice
B Williamson

[bjamesw]

I do have the original windows 98 reconfiguration disc that came with the computer. Can I simply make an IDE connection to a working laptop - or an external cd/rw drive and load the reconfig disc from there?
B Williamson

[leeg]

ha, you have a funny way of answering your own question. I don't think you should ever consider wasting the time to make floppies of win98.

If you have a desktop computer you can install the laptop hard drive in a desktop pc , search google for a laptop desktop ide converter...
example http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=41993 that one happens to be 2 cents at this time.

From there you can use a better cd rom drive

[Mr_Nicholas]

Hey buddy...
i've done a similar thing with a computer that i bought without a cd rom drive.
my solution was to copy a w98 disc onto the hard disk of another computer. then i found a bootdisk that enabled tcp ip thru dos and used a floppy to boot the computer without the cdrom drive. i then copied the file across the network and installed from hdd.
obviously for this to work you will need network cards in both computers and a bit of network know how. i can find you the floppy boot disk if you would like.
i'm sure there would be a bootdisk that loads usb drivers if you have a look around.
for example, the below drivers which can be put on a boot disk allow USB hard disk, USB floppy, USB cd rom etc. etc.
http://www.pocketec.net/downloads/duse_4_2.zip

Theres is more than one way to skin a cat...