Install laptop OS with swapable floppy/cdrom

[goosemold]

One other thing: Even though the BIOS is password protected, the HP laptop has a feature whereby I can still alter the boot order. By pressing the Esc key during bootup, I can enter the boot menu, which currently shows 1. CD-ROM/DVD Drive 2.*Removable Device 3.*Hard Disk

 

[Abhi]

Try FDISK ....

That ll tell you how much of the HDD is used up and the pther partition details...

As far the ESC thing is concerned... try choosing 1 and putting a random disk in the cdrom drive...

does the drive spin up and light flicker? trying to boot? If it does, simply try my earlier post.

 

[goosemold]

I just want to thank all who have offered help. I haven't been able to solve the problem, and I'm becoming convinced that the drive must be defective. I think I have a good source for a replacement; I'll report back on any progress. Thanks again.

 

[goosemold]

Progress! I acquired a working CD-ROM drive, used a utility to get rid of a persistent NTFS partition, reformatted, copied to the harddrive mscdex.exe, and my edited autoexec.bat and config.sys, booted from my Win98 CD, and installed. Win 98 is installed and working!

Remaining problems:

Win 98 sees the laptop monitor as "unknown monitor" and the image on the screen is half-size. I guess I need a better display driver for this Omnibook 4100. I'll start looking. If you all have any suggestions, I'd welcome your continued assistance. Thanks.