Thanks for all the help, however all the drivers listed assume there is an OS installed on the computer. That's the problem, I don't have an OS installed on my computer and can not get the computer to recognize the CD drive without having a CD driver installed first. If this were a desktop where 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 OS. 

This is a laptop and there can be no CD installed when the floppy is installed. When I use the floppy boot disk with CD rom support I get the error message that no CD drive could be found so the CD drive installation was 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 would find the CD drive and install the CD driver. No luck. 

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 recognized 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 before I can use the CD drive to load an OS. This sounds logical to me but then I am only familiar with working with desktops, not with laptops so maybe I am missing something.

Any help on installing an OS on a laptop with a HD that has been partitioned and formated would help.

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