Can I restore Windows 98 from an USB external CR-rom drive?

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.