[running95]

I have a Dell Latitude LS400 and the harddrive has been formatted to boot to the DOS MODE. I have an external CD drive i have inserted the disk in and tried to boot the laptop from that CD! But I get the error message "invalid system disk"

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When you boot the system without the CD connected do your get the MS-DOs prompt? If you don't get the prompt it's not formatted with the system files? If you're using a USB CD you will need to load both the CD drivers and USB drivers and enable USB legacy support. This is assuming that there is no "native support" for USB in the BIOS.

On the other hand it the machine does boot from the hard drive and you have another machine, if you can take the hard drive out and transfer all the win98 installtion files, the whole folder to it, enable show hidden files for this, then put the hard drive back in, boot it, type in C:\win98\setup and you will be in business.

[Tyger]

When you boot the system without the CD connected do your get the MS-DOs prompt? If you don't get the prompt it's not formatted with the system files? If you're using a USB CD you will need to load both the CD drivers and USB drivers and enable USB legacy support. This is assuming that there is no "native support" for USB in the BIOS.

On the other hand it the machine does boot from the hard drive and you have another machine, if you can take the hard drive out and transfer all the win98 installtion files, the whole folder to it, enable show hidden files for this, then put the hard drive back in, boot it, type in C:\win98\setup and you will be in business.

[Whiskeyman]

I don't believe that old laptop supports booting from an USB drive. Does the laptop have a working floppy drive? If so you should be able to do a network install.

[BlueScreen-Bertrand]

Hi,

does this computer have a floppy drive?

You could copy the Windows 98 Files to floppies and then unpack them on the laptop hard disk.

The easier possibility would be to use an adapter, connecting a 2.5"-HDD to the IDE Connector of a PC.

I only found this one:
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