boot from pcmcia cd-rom?

[statuspending]

i just got a free 100mhz pentium laptop for free, and found a pcmcia 24x hival cdrom drive for 25 bones. does anybody know if/how one would use this drive to install an operating system? it has win95 on it, but i am trying to put win98se on it. apparently the machine doesn't like booting with a win98 boot disk.

thanks

[Dufferoon]

I've never heard of a laptop booting straight from a PCMCIA CD ROM.It's possible on a desktop machine by changing the BIOS settings but they have a more direct connection to the CD ROM.
Here's a couple of workarounds that spring to mind.
First of all, I presume your CD ROM is working ok under win 95 and that Win 95 is also working ok.
You need to make a Win95 startup disk. Go into MyComputer->Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs and click the tab marked "Startup Disk" and follow the instructions.
The Easy Way
=========
- Next, use your CD ROM to copy all the source files from your CD on to your Hard Drive. I haven't seen the source CD ROM for Win98se but if it's like my Win95 there is a program called Setup and all the other source files are in a directory called Win98. They should be about 121 MB. Your target directory can have any name other than "Windows" or "Win98".
After that start up your pc using your startup disc.
Type in the instruction"Rename Windows Windowx" to rename your existing Windows directory
Type CD [whatever name you chose for your win98 files a minute ago]
Type Setup
Say a prayer..........
The Hard Way
=========
For this you need a DOS driver for your CD ROM drive, PC Socket Services and PC Card Services. These are the drivers that make pcmcia cards run under DOS. You may be able to get them via the web from the manufacturers of the CD ROM or maybe (in the case of the second two) from the manufacturers of your laptop. You then have to edit the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files on your startup floppy so that these drivers are loaded. Notepad will be enough for this. The lines you need to add will look something like:
DEVICEHIGH=A:\CDDR.EXE
You also need to add HIMEM.SYS (which is in C:\windows\command)
and MSCDEX.
After this startup and rename your existing windows directory as before. If you can get your CD ROM to work from the startup disc you can just go to the directory with the source files on and then go.

Good luck!

BTW, I assume you have a legal copy of Win 98 with a product key. This is a 25 digit code with both letters and numbers, arranged as 5 X 5 digits