Establishing wireless connection under W98SE?

I have an old Compaq Armada M700 laptop. Bought it partially corrupted.
It needs new video driver, among other things. It has a DVD drive, and it plays DVD movies just fine. It has Win98SE installed and a Win98 directory, from which I ran setup. As far as I can tell, that didn't fix what I needed.
The DVD drive, when fed anything besides a DVD movie(Win98SE install disk, a Win 2000 pro disk, a game disk) will just sit there for a while, allowing no response from any mouse click or keyboard entry. Finally, it'll come up with Windows Media player and identify the disk as a Music CD. So, I can't import anything into the laptop.I tried moving a downloaded ATI video driver file to the laptop via a cruzer micro drive(USB device), but Win98SE needs a USB driver to recognize the drive-so I'm caught in a catch22 situation. I have a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Adapter (MN-720), which, when I plugged it into the PCMCIA slot, was immediately recognized correctly. Now, how do I connect to my wireless network under Win98SE? Win XP makes it easy, but I'm stuck with Win 98. Also, any hope for the DVD drive when I finally fix Win 98, or is this a hardware problem? In other words, is the DVD drive dead to anything besides DVD movies?
Thanks.

 

How did you boot the machine when you ran setup ?

If you booted it from anything other than the Startup Floppy ( good old fashioned DOS ) the reinstall will fix NOTHING. It will not overwrite inuse files.

And if you ran setup from within Windows then there is a good possibility that you have two Windows folders.

For instance; C:\Windows and C:\Windows001.

BillyBob

 

OOPSS !!! I did not read ( or pay attention )-

My idea may not work on that type of a machine ( an OEM )

BillyBob

 

Progress(?) report.

This is just an update, in hopes that someone can tell me whether the DVD drive is defective, or, whether the symptoms are an indication of the corrupted operating system.
This laptop is a PII-366 with 128 megs, a 6.5 gig HD. The DVD drive sits in what I think is a hot-swappable bay. I do not have the floppy. Looking around on ebay, I see a very large number of Compaq Armadas, and they seem to come with either internal floppy drives or ones that connect externally via the serial port. I might mention that I bought this laptop in a PawnShop "as-is ". It came with a USB mouse and a Microsoft Network Adapter(PCMCIA), a carrying case.
The DVD drive plays a DVD movie just fine. When I put a data disk in, be it Win98SE, or a CDR copy of the same, a copy of Win2000pro, or a commercially produced driver/installation disk that came with my wireless kit, the computer slows it's response to the point that I can still move the mouse cursor, but clicking on any icon or the start button in the lower left corner will get a response in about 2 or 3 minutes. Eventually, Windows Media Player pops up, and the disk is "recognized" as an audio disk. Using file>open will show one audio track. This is true for all of the data disks I've tried. When I insert an audio disk, either a CDR or a commercially produced one, the music plays, but with about 20-30% distortion in the form of scratchy noise. Stopping the music and ejecting the disk occurs with expected speed. When the drive contains a Data disk, the eject button on the drive doesn't work, and the only way to eject is during a reboot.
What worries me most about the drive is that, in BIOS setup, I can set the CD drive as bootable,make it first, and make the HD secondary, and the bootup still progresses to the installed Win98 OS. This leads me to believe that the drive's malfunction precedes any operating system driver loading. I think I recall that Windows 98SE is a bootable disc. Am I right? In any case, I know for sure that win2000pro is bootable, and the laptop still boots into the installed OS.
As for my previous request for help with establishing a wireless connection, I found the manual that came with the wireless router and PCMCIA adapter.
Unfortunately, the instructions require the use of the install CD as well as the Win98SE CD, neither of which are read by tis drive. I tried circumventing this dilemma by plugging in the wired Notebook Adapter(Microsoft Broadband Networking Adapter-Model MN-120).
Plugging it into the PCMCIA slot makes it show up correctly(Just like my wireless adapter (MN-720), and the device manger says that it is working properly. I then took the DSL cable from the back of the wireless router and plugged it into the network adapter, opened Internet Explorer, and set the opening page under tools>internet options to my home page(Bellsouth). IE just sits there, acquiring, but nothing happens. I tried to call Bellsouth tech support, but gave up after 15 minutes on hold. Did I jump to wrong conclusion that the DSL cable and the cable that goes into the PCMCIA card are identical?
I do have an external floppy drive that came with my daughter's Gateway, but it is a USB drive, so I can't even import a Win98SE driver for my Scandisk USB micro cruzer. It is only 995Kb, so if I could install the USB driver into this laptop, I could then use the USB device to import a new video driver(15 megs), and at least get rid of the vertical stripes that occur during the Win98 logo on bootup and shutdown. The video displays just fine otherwise.
My intent is to make this a functioning laptop to give to my younger daughter so that she can connect to the net in her job search efforts.
I think the best thing to do is format and reinstall 98SE, or maybe even 2000pro, but the DVD drive balks at reading any but music and DVD movie disks. Help?

 

Small addendum

I did run setup from within windows. Looking under the DOS command prompt at the root directory, I see only one windows directory. The sound driver was restored, so that I now get sound. Curiously, I would not get the Windows desktop opening sound before, yet I still got music and dialog just fine in the DVD movie. When I attempted to place the speaker icon onto the task bar, I got some error message about driver or device not installed. Running setup at least cured that. Also, the stripes on the Win98 logo screen are now intermittent, but still there.