Changing Hard Drive without floppy

 

You can make a Bootable Image Emulation copy of a W98 Boot Diskette on a PC with a floppy drive and a CD Burner with Roxio or Nero software. It works just like a bootdiskette except it uses your CDROM drive. It has all the DOS tools for drive prep(Fdisk, Format, etc) After prep you reboot and select start your Computer with CDROM support and at the A: Prompt,  type your CD Drive Letter given just above the Prompt and a colon and enter. That CDROM letter will be one higher than normal because the MS Ramdrive shoves it up a letter. You will get a new prompt for your CDROM, hot swap your Windows CD for the Boot CDR, type and enter setup and that should kickoff the install.

Jerswork is also correct about the Dell resource CDs with Diagnostics to run in DOS, but it is a bit tricky with some of the models Resource CD. On those, after the Diagnostics loads, and you get a prompt list, you Exit to DOS. You get a DOS Prompt for R:\DIAGS>   You hotswap the Windows CD for the Resource CD, type setup and enter. It will give you a Bad Command or File Message that 1st time, but then give you a new R:\ prompt, but without the DIAGS included. Type setup again and enter and off you go.

  With other models Resource CD, you get a couple of prompted actions as soon as it boots up, and includes the boot option. Those are much easier to use.