First, it's rather complicated to even be successful at doing this with an older 
system.

Second, when you rebooted, you cleared everything out of the memory so whatever files 
you had loaded would have to be resident on either the HDD and your autoexec/config.sys 
have to correctly point to the location either on the HDD or the floppy to load. 
 If you reformated the HDD and that's where they were installed to, they would be 
gone and you load nothing.

If you want an idea of what is involved in loading drivers so that even an on-board 
USB device will be recognized through DOS, look here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm 

There are other guides all over the web, but yours will be complicated by the fact 
that you are using an add-on device, not a device on the motherboard.

Can't really point you to a well written guide for your specific needs, as I had 
little success with older machines that didn't support USB for booting when it wasn't 
an option in the BIOS.  Either way, you have to make sure your autoexec and config.sys 
are correctly addressing the CD ROM and all drivers needed, after the drivers for 
the hardware are loaded.  On top of that, you only have so much memory to use for 
loading drivers etc so your memory handler needs to be correct also.  (Also loaded 
in the config.sys file)  Configuring a DOS environment isn't easy if you don't have 
the old school experience in doing it, and there aren't that many guides around for 
doing it anymore, but they can be found with enough searching. 







On Friday, February 8, 2008 at 2:36 pm, LNG724 wrote:

>I am trying to do a clean install of 98 on an older laptop with an external cd-rom 

>connected thru a pcmcia card. I am booting up using a win 98 startup floppy. I chose 

>to start with no cd-rom support and after I get to a:\ I then install the pcmcia 

>cd rom setup floppy, reboot this time with cd-rom support and then look for my cd-rom 

>drive in which to run my 98 disc. I can not get  the player recognized to do this. 

>I was able once to run setup and have 98 load but it had to be aborted because of 

>a setup procedure that I missed. I reformatted the hard drive and now... this is 

>where I am at.

>Any help with this would be appreciated.  

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