good morning,
i need to know what i need to do to get an operating system on a laptop that the cd rom is bad.
thanks for all the suggestions in advance.

Are you sure the cd-rom drive is dead ?
Or does it just require drivers for use in dos mode ?

Please say more about the configuration of the laptop. Particularly if it has a floppy drive, USB ports and why you don't have an OS on it now.

Budfred