Hello,

A few months ago son brings me his laptop we bought him for high school graduation in 2009 (so, yeah the warranty has expired) and he cannot boot into the OS (Vista).  All it will do is display a vertical flashing curser.  I tried all the standard restoration procedures but could not get it to boot into the OS.  Finally I dug out and dusted off an old Windows98 start up disk plugged in my USB floppy drive and was able to boot into the "98" command line OS.  I didn't have anything to loose, or so I thought, and I deleted the C: partition, created a new one and formatted it in FAT32 thinking that perhaps I could reload the OS from scratch with the OS DVD that came with the laptop.  Well, as luck would have it I am now without the DVD/CD driver it takes to reinstall the OS, and the DVD/CD driver is on a CD (which makes no sense to me) that also came with the laptop along with all the other drivers that are on a separate DVD.  I have an old A+ Cert (XP) which means I know just enough to be dangerous.  Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated.