OS install problem with broken CD drive. USB only!

You people may think I am crazy for even asking, but here goes anyway.

I can not install an operating system on an old laptop I am not ready to recycle yet. It is an Inspiron 7500 from Dell, 600Mhz etc. Six or so years old and I would like to give it to a younger family member.

The problem is the CD-Rom is out but the floppy part of the combo works. The computer is formatted and I can not access the hard drive for setup of Win 98 SE from the USB CD burner.

Does anyone have any idea of an adapter or a direction I am not thinking of short of pulling the hard drive and installing Win 98 SE on another system?

Pull out the hard drive and put in into a desktop system with a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adaptor, they're pretty cheap, and useful to have around in case of problems.
Format the drive to FAT32.
Boot to a DOS disk and type sys c: or whatever drive letter that the BIOS assigned to it. This will make the 2.5 drive DOS bootable.
Boot the desktop back into Windows.
Copy the contents of the 98 installation disk into a folder on the 2.5 disk.
Put the drive back into the laptop.
Turn it on, it will boot to DOS.
Go into the directory you copied the 98 CD into.
Type Setup, and do the rest of the Win98 install like normal.

No CD needed.

I would still look for a cheap replacement of the Dell CD drive, whoever you give it to will need CD access for programs and games. eBay and local computer shows are a good place to find cheap ones.

USB support is pretty spotty in Win98, you might not get your USB CD drive to work at all. Something that old would have a first-generation USB port, 1.2mbit, veeeeerrrry slow.

Good call on a reusable drive.

When I do that with old systems I give to people I like or I'm related to (basically those I'm stuck with being their support), I get the OS cleanly installed and tweaked, then make an image of the clean boot partition with Ghost or Drive Image, and put it on a hidden FAT32 partition on the drive. Then when it gets toasted (and it will) I can recover the system painlessly. I also make them put their data on a D: partition so when C: bombs, their data stays intact. (barring hardware failure of course, but that's what additional external backups are for)

Have fun!

I use the DOS version of Drive Image, it's on the Tools menu. Partition Magic also can hide partitions. I don't know about Ghost. When you're recovering a toasted boot drive from the image backup; remember to unhide the partition so you can boot to DOS and see it.

You'll have to hide the partition since you're using Win98, drive assignments are automatic. In Win2k or XP, you just don't assign a drive letter to the partition using Disk Management. You could also suppress the drive letter in Win98 using TweakUI if you don't want to deal with partition hiding.

I've been extended family IT support for too long, I don't make computers for family any more, just maintain what I got. :x