thanks for your responses. I have a possibly more tricky question now.
I managed to create a win 98 startup disk on 3.5" and inserted it when starting and true enough the system loaded to the dos prompt of a: and i could switch to c:. The problem now is that the laptop in question is a few years old now, and has an interchangeable 3.5 drive and a CD-Rom drive. So when i load my startup disk it tries installing the drivers for the CD-Rom, obviously cant find the CD-Rom (since its not attached) and so aborts the driver installation so when i change my 3.5 to my CD-Rom to run my win 98 installation disk it doesnt recognise the CD-Rom!!! Any ideas on this one?
I thought about loading to the DOS prompt, copying my startup disk to c:, then restarting with my CD drive in with the hope that it would boot to the dos prompt from c: and install my cd drivers. However, i tried this but cant get it to work!
Does anyone know if this technique would work? If so how can i get it to work? Any other suggestions? Would the comp recognise an external CD-Rom attached through the parallel port?(i can get hold of one from a friend)?, or is their a simpler and quicker method?

Sorry for the long message but im (well my flatmate) is depserate for a solution.
Thanks people :-)