formatting a Laptop drive with no floppy

[PtBetsie]

I'm working on a donated PIII laptop that has insufficient RAM and hard drive space for the XP Pro that is installed. I want to put WIN98SE on it temporarily so that I know it is a working laptop before spending money on more RAM and a newer HD. With no floppy drive, I don't know how to get the drive formatted. If I have it boot to the 98 cd install, it asks me to insert the floppy to proceed with the format. How do I get around this problem?

[johnny_quest]

how did someone install xp on the laptop to begin with if the ram was insufficient and there wasn't enough hard drive space? The installer wouldn't allow it...

You should be able to boot off of the Win98 CD using the "start computer with ..... support" or something like that, and the installer will format the drive.

[SufferWell1396]

i dont think it should do that... or atleast it doesnt do that to me on my disk...

Kill Disk (http://www.killdisk.com/)

Boom, there ya go. Download the Free version, shoot it on a CD, and boot.

[Paul Komski]

Does booting to the CD take you to a command prompt - or does this message come after you attempt to start setup. BiNG on a CD could repartition and format but normally that shouldn't be necessary pre-requisite when the installation CD is bootable.

[SufferWell1396]

Johnny it would still start if the user had 64 or more MB of RAM, but 64 MB is too horrible to run XP on, and maybe is what PtBetsie is referring to. Or is using a hdd with XP pre-installed. Either way, PtBetsie needs to get the drive formatted, and thats the problem...

[PtBetsie]

I can boot from the cd with two choices, with cdrom support and without. When I choose cd support so that I can access the cd, it goes to the setup screen but then asks me to insert the floppy boot disk. I have one since I have used it in the past but this laptop has no floppy drive! How or why someone put xp on this laptop is beyond me but I want to get rid of it.

[Paul Komski]

When you get to the A:\> prompt first run
A:\> FDISK
and get it to delete any existing partitions and then to create a new one and mark it as active. I think part of your problem has arisen because of the existence of system NTFS partition on the hard drive.

Reboot to the A:\> prompt (with CD ROM support) and first format the newly created partition with:
A:\> FORMAT C: /S
which should give you a bootable formatted partition on the hard drive, confirmed by the message System Transferred after format completes. Then change to the WIN98 directory on the CD with
A:\> X:
X:\> CD WIN98
where X is the drive letter for the CD.

You should now be able to run setup from the WIN98 directory on the CD rather than use the setup.exe file in the root directory. viz:
X:\WIN98> SETUP

You can, if you prefer transfer the setup files to the C: drive having first got back to the root of C: and made a directory for them with
X:\> C:
C:\> MD CABS
C:\> Copy X:\WIN98\*.* C:\CABS

Since you should now have a bootable hard drive you can boot to it and run
C:\> CD CABS
C:\CABS> SETUP

Running setup from the hard drive like this is usually smoother (no more CD access) and the files will remain available for windows if it needs them in the future without prompting you for the CD again.