Alpha wrote:

Can we - take out the hard drive and format it (using appropriate
existing adapters) in FAT on another machine and -
copy the CD contents and device drivers to an install folder,
and - put that drive back into the laptop, and -
boot with the Win98 floppy, and -
run Setup from the install folder, bypassing the CD drive?

Yes, you can do that.

In fact, if you remove the laptop's hard drive and slave it to another
PC, yes you can fdisk and format the hard drive, and put the dos system
files on the drive (format drive: /s) to make it bootable.

Then you can copy the contents of a win-98 CD to the drive (I'd copy it
to it's own directory, like c:\win98-cd).

While the drive is still slaved to another PC, that is a good time to
transfer other installation CD's to the drive - like Microsoft office or
other apps. It's also a good time to download win-98 drivers for the
laptop's video hardware, motherboard chipset, ethernet and usb hardware,
etc. It's far easier to install them once they're already on the drive.

Don't forget to put a copy of winzip on the drive as well, as it will
probably be needed to unzip those driver files.

When it's all done, and the drive is back in the laptop, just make sure
that there is no file on the drive called "win.com". Sometimes (or most
times) the presence of that file anywhere on a system will prevent
win-98 installation.