reinstall without floppy problems

I have installed win98se after a format of my hard drive(useing a boot disk cd rom, as there is no floppy drive on the laptop), but when the o/s comes to ask for the drivers from the win98se disk it will not see the cd rom.
In Device manager the cd rom is not listed, so how did it use the cd rom for installing win98se in the first place? I assume that this means that it was working through dos somehow?? And now that I am in windows there is no driver to run the cd rom drive. Since there is no floppy drive on this laptop I'm kinda stuck.
I need to get the cd rom working in windows so I can install everything else including the cd rom itself.
This is the first time this has ever happened to to me after a reinstallation of any operating system. Dont know where to go from here.
If I installed the win98 files on to the hard drive before setup would there be a driver capable of running the cd rom on the win98 cd(win 98se disk)?

Help please.

 

That's sort of odd. I've done countless number of fresh Win9.x installations and have never had to deal w/ that sort of problem. There are generic ATAPI drivers that Win98 uses and it should be found any STANDARD Win98 boot diskette.

Did you reinstall W98 yourself? If not, i assume the user restored the image perhaps from another partition or HDD.

I don't see any other solution for you now other than to reinstall your OS. I was about to say you could use the 'Add/Remove Hardware' applet in the control panel, but even that's not going to work as it will ask for your Win98 CD.

 

I've had this happen during the install process. For some reason the device:cdrom and drivers are not loaded until further in the process. In other words it was looking for and installing other devices before it actually loaded and recognized the cdrom. I do one of two things: either I let it load the device which will be disabled in device manager and later go back to it and install/update the drivers pointing it to the now recognized cdrom, or through previous experience with this behavior and knowing this was going to happen I used xcopy to copy the contents of the install cdrom to my harddrive and installed from there.

 

Q. In Device manager the cd rom is not listed, so how did it use the cd rom for installing win98se in the first place.
A. useing a boot disk cd
The first stage of installing Win98 is really nothing more than the copying of files, your boot cd provided the drivers.
You may have the problem with the CD drive fixed by installing the motherboard drivers. Now how to install with no CD? Simply use the boot CD only to work the CD, and copy the CD's onto the hard drive, remove boot CD then boot up windows.