DJW wrote:
My laptop's internal DVD player stopped working a year or more ago. It
is not a software problem but hardware that was confirmed already. Now
my laptop will not boot. The battery is dead and the cord became
unplugged from the transformer as it was starting up. Now it asks for
the A drive floppy disk but cannot get back to C drive. Am I screwed?
I can't get it to boot in safe mode or any way other than the start up
98 floppy. The external USB drive is an Iomega. Is there a way to use
the boot floppy with added USB CD drivers for the Iomega on it to get
it to work and if so what would I need to do? How would I put the
drivers on the floppy? I also have a backpack external parallel CD-Rom
drive that also can be run from a PCMCA card I have. Would I have a
better chance of using the Windows 98 CD with it through that type of
interface? Or is my only option to try to track down and buy a CD-Rom
for the inside of the computer. I tried running scandisk with the
floppy booted up but it said something like could not find the boot
log for C drive.

That's not a nice problem.
First check in the bios setup(Del or Esc, during boot) if there is a
hard disk recognized and the order the computer tries to boot from the
different media.
Iomega would have the drivers to install it under Dos, (your start-up
disk and you would have to load those drivers in config.sys (or edit
your config.sys so it will recognize the Iomega drive) and the usb port.
That might be the hard part here [ usb port ], no clue how to do that.
Running the external cd-rom, if you can install it(see the
manufacturer's web site I guess)
If you start up with the floppy disk and it can't find the Windows CD,
then you're at a dos prompt:something like this a:
You could try and type c: then "enter" if it accepts that you have a
hard disk. If you can get into the directory c:\windows\ [ c: cd
windows ] then a scan disk is possible from there. That might give you
some clue's what went wrong. [ c:\windows\ scandisk ]
Just for this kind of mishaps I have the windows install CD copied to
every hard drive I have, then I can always reinstall when needed.
Good luck.
Richard