The reason you need to have a bootable disk for your OS is because most laptops have a modular drive bay (for switching between a floppy disk drive and a CD drive). When the OS is erased from the computer the drivers that allow you to access the modular drive bay are gone. The laptop I got did not come with a floppy drive so using the WIN 98 SE startup disk was out of the question. All you have to do though is put in the bootable CD, and change the setting on the laptop to boot from the CD instead of the hard disk (there was fragments of the prior OS still on the hard drive on mine). Also if the person who owned prior to your purchase and they decided just to wipe the whole drive clean of everything including DOS (and the command.com file on mine) then your really really really need the bootable OS disk. O By the way the Win 98 SE disk that i mentioned is Legal
P.S. Another reason you need a WIN XP bootable disk is because Win 98, 98se, nt, and ME are not bootable disks so it won't automaticly boot up if you pop it in the cd drive and start the computer (I tried, with original legal disks though

)
__________________
Whats the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets