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Originally Posted by [527]phil
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  ) |
I know for a fact that the original retail and oem copies of Windows 98, 98SE, NT, ME, 2000, and XP are all bootable via the CD. No drivers should be needed to access the modular bay, it is the same as having the cd directly wired to the motherboard. If you have an original disc, then there should be no problem booting from it once you change the boot order in the BIOS. Often when people make copies of these discs they just copy the files instead of making a direct copy, and then you loose the bootable part of the cd.