does anyone have windows 95 or 98 on all floppies? or know how to do a network install on a laptop with no OS and no cd drive?

thisis a far stretch, but I think you may need to install DOS, then do some fancy hoohaa to map a network drive, get onto the network and download windows. Or, you could just borrow an external CD-Rom.

How big of a hard drive are you talking?

I'd go for a DOS and Linux boot disk two-pronged attack.

First of all, get a fairly well optioned DOS boot disks. Make a bootdisk and put fdisk, format, sys, attrib, edit, and all the good utilities you might need on it. Boot the laptop with it, create partitions, format, etc. Don't forget to make the drive bootable.

Then, get something like tomsrtbt or the Slackware install disks. Using something like one of those, you'd load the network drivers and copy the OS installation files across the network onto the hard drive.

Reboot, run setup.exe, and you're golden.

Failing that, I guess you could always use the PKZip disk-spanning option to put 95 or 98 on multiple floppies, but that's quite painful. Before resorting to something like that, I'd see if anyone had a laptop-to-desktop hard drive converter.

Assuming you don't have USB ports...

Snag a Serial-to-USB converter so we can hook my external CDRW up to your laptop.

Assuming you DO have USB ports...

Snag me sometime and I can help you use my ext. CDRW and Win98SE disk to boot that sucker into oblivion.

Let me know....

-jkpq45