Have you checked the laptop manufacturer's www site for drivers and an
installation procedure for the CD in DOS? The usual procedure is to
prepare the hard drive for booting to DOS with CD support using the floppy,
then do the install from the CD (or the CD copied to the hard drive) after
booting to the hard drive with the CD drive connected.

If the CD is a third party product such as USB then it gets a bit trickier.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"pemo" wrote in message
...
- have a similar situation. i have formatted and partitioned a laptop , i
have both the external floppy and cd drive units, but while the floppy
drive
is hooked up with the bootdisk in it, it can't recognize, or find, a cd
drive on the laptop, so ultimately i can not run the win98 install disk i
have. the lap top does not have the driver installed for the cd drive.
what
can i do to get the cd drive working when hooked up.
thanks for any info.