We have it so easy now.

[AmEv]

support.dell.com
Home users
Drivers and Downloads
Service Tag (should be on bottom of laptop); if no tag, model number.

[Konrad]

Make yourself a handy Win9x DOS boot disk while you've got the system running ... for next time.

[NightrainSrt4]

AmEv, thanks for reminding me. I put it out of my head because I figured that didn't go back that far. When I get some time I'll check it out.

The problem wasn't the boot disk. I had already used a win9x boot disk the first time. The problem was that I could only have either a floppy or a cd-rom drive in the laptop. When I was using a win9x boot floppy it wouldn't let me load the cd drivers because it could find no cd drive, because there physically wasn't. So it couldn't find the cd. Then when I tried a win9x cd boot disk, it wouldn't find the win98 cd when I swapped disks out, using ram drive or not.

In the end I extracted the contents of the windows98 cd, then I shoved the boot disk onto a cd and told the cd to be bootable and put the contents of the windows98 cd into a folder. Put CD in, boots up into the boot disk, FDISK, format, open cd directory, navigate to windows98 folder, setup. In the end that worked. Life would have been much simpler had I had both a floppy and cd drive in the computer, or if my windows 98 was one of the bootable ones.

In the end I'll probably just install windows 2000 down the line.

[xr4man]

i can only guess that you are using an early win98 disk. i have always had no problems at all booting from a win98se disk and having it load cd drivers and installing.

or did miss something in an earlier post that explains that?