Can't use floppy and CD rom at same time

[Hammer]

My mother in law's laptop is playing silly bugg3rs so I want to reformat her hard drive and re-install windows to give her a clean slate. She's currently on XP but I'll put Win98 on because it's quite an old laptop and that's what she was used to before.

I'm comfortable doing this and have done it on a couple of desktops with no major problems (apart from forgetting the /s in the command line � nightmare!!)

The only problem is that the laptop has one bay for CD Rom and floppy drive, so you can't have both at the same time.

Can I burn a copy of the win98 recovery disk as a bootable CD so that I can use this to boot up and then install windows from CD? Is this the best way to do it?

[Bazzzabaz]

Id would simply boot from your Windows 98 cd.

[Hammer]

The problem is I have an 'interesting' version of win98 which is not bootable. Would my bootable recovery disk idea work?

[Sligachan14]

Bootable CD

http://www.pcbeginner.com/tools/pcdoctor.htm

[Sligachan14]

Apologies - wrong site

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[fo3nix]

if you have it, win2000 would be a far better OS to put on there. considerably more secure and stable. also runs amazingly well on old hardware, even stuff it wasn't supposed to actually run on.

[Hammer]

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I've had a look at the ultimate boot cd website and it looks like that might do the trick. All I really want to do is be able to get a dos prompt so I can format drive c, then navigate around the windows cd to install it. Will one of the apps on UBCD do this?