I had the same problem several years ago with a Toshiba notebook with no
internal drives.  I had to buy an external cd drive and hook up an
external floppy to boot to dos, the external cd drive manufacturer gave
me a dos driver for the cd which then allowed me to install whichever os
I wanted.  I don't know if I still have the driver or not.  I would
think you could find a dos driver for a cd and just copy to the drive
and then you would be good to go. What OS are you trying to work with?
   I would think in bios you should be able to control the boot order and
boot from an original OS cd.
Good Luck
Bill Anderson


 >> Date:    Sat, 22 Jul 2006 21:55:39 -0400
 >> From:    Tom <[log in to unmask]>
 >> Subject: Re: Loading OS to laptop
 >>
 >> Thanks for all the help, however all the drivers listed assume there
 >> is a= n OS installed on the computer. That's the problem, I don't have
 >> an OS in= stalled on my computer and can not get the computer to
 >> recognize the CD d= rive without having a CD driver installed first.
 >> If this were a desktop w= here both the floppy and CD drive were
 >> installed, I could just boot from = the floppy, install the oak
 >> technologies CD driver and then install the O= S.=20
 >>
 >> This is a laptop and there can be no CD installed when the floppy is
 >> inst= alled. When I use the floppy boot disk with CD rom support I get
 >> the erro= r message that no CD drive could be found so the CD drive
 >> installation wa= s aborted. I copied the boot disk files to the HD,
 >> installed the CD drive=  and re-booted from the HD thinking that the
 >> Oak Technologies program wou= ld find the CD drive and install the CD
 >> driver. No luck.=20
 >>
 >> Have been on-line with Dell and they tell me I have a bad CD drive but
 >> I = know it works. I had borrowed a WIN XP utility disk and the CD
 >> drive reco= gnized and started to run the WinXP utility. I didn't let
 >> it run because = I can not put Win XP on this computer. It only has a
 >> 300MHz P2 processor = with 128MB ram. This is why I think I need a CD
 >> driver for a laptop befor= e I can use the CD drive to load an OS.
 >> This sounds logical to me but the= n I am only familiar with working
 >> with desktops, not with laptops so mayb= e I am missing something.
 >>
 >> Any help on installing an OS on a laptop with a HD that has been
 >> partitio= ned and formated would help.
 >>

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