cant change boot order on laptop

bulldog

Hi
I have had a dell latitude cpi for sometime now but last week crashed so i formated the drive going well until i tried to change the boot order in the bios which seemed to be stuck on diskette (floppy) I have loaded win98 boot up disk which gets me to c drive ok ,my problem is that i only have 1 drive in at 1 time so when floppys in booting up it cant find cd drive.I have looked at many posts they all say about password protected but i have nothing that asks me for that.
any help would be great.
Alec

Topper

From a win98 systems floppy disk you should have fdisked the drive, made an active partition, all using systems disk, then you would need to format the HD using the command format c: /s and the system files would be transferred to the Hard Drive boot partition. Are you sure the drive is recognised in the Bios? If so you should have no problems with the above procedure. If the drive is not showing in the bios then it need replacing

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2cvbloke

I've had this trouble with old Dells, the only solution I found was to take out the hard drive, fit it into another computer or external hard drive caddy, then copy the "Win98" folder from the Windows98 CD onto the drive, then refit it into the laptop and start off the floppy, then use the following command to start the Windows setup:

Then you can install Windows easily, and as it'll be on the hard drive it'll go much faster than normal...

Just don't forget your Windows number, it should be on the base of your laptop...

bulldog

Hi Topper 2cvbloke
Many thanks for your replys
Topper when i got to format c:/s it came up with unsuficant memory so i will have to go with 2cvbloke and going to a mate of mine soon he has the same machine so will put 98 on the drive as suggested.
Thanks again you both have been very helpfull
Bulldog.
just to let anyone know that i did find a way to clear the bios called the paper clip method but a bit beyond me taking it apart.

compufunk

Erasing the CMOS with jumper (The paper clip method as you describe it) is probably a bit drastic in any case. IF you can access the BIOS settings, restoring factory settings from within the menus is the same thing as easing the CMOS.

The only time I've ever found the need to do this was when the BIOS was password protected and the owners of the box didnt know the password.