Hi I'm a newbie here and not very knowledgeable with pc's so please forgive if this makes no sense.
I have an HP Omnibook 210 laptop which although old was running ME fine for Word, Excel etc. For some stupid reason I let a friend of mine persuade me to load XP Home over ME to see if it worked. It was way too slow so I assumed all I had to do was format the C drive and reload a Win98 disc I had.(ME was pre-loaded when I got he machine off ebay and no disc came with it) So I wiped the c drive and put in a 98 start up floppy I downloaded from bootdisk.com ( I think thats what it was called)
I have been using an external IBM USB CD drive as the machine only came with the floppy. Here is my problem.
I put in the floppy start up disc and it says the usual "start with cd rom support" "start without cd rom support" etc. Whatever one I click on the cd drive starts up and then stops after about 10 seconds and "MSCD001 error cannot find drivers" message appears.
I have taken it to my local pc repair shop for them to load Win98 back in but they say it can't be done (and have charged me ?50 for their time!!!).
Yes I know it's a very old machine which probably should be put in the trash but it was okay for my studies and as a nursing student money is very tight.
Hope someone out there can help guide an unknowledgable through this minefield.:merror:

Hello and welcome to PCHF,

Is this a USB external drive? I do not think that they will work with Win98 unless you load special drivers.

Is it possible to add an internal cd/dvd drive in there?

dose't windows 98se come with usb drivers or what about getting windows ME or 2000 i think you can still get ME

Yes, Windows 98SE was shipped with usb drivers. Not many boards had usb sockets at the time but the drivers were certainly included in the SE pack.

Hi, thanks for the replys. Yes it is an external cd drive by IBM. The machine has one USB port. I did visit the IBM drivers site and noticed that they have a driver for external USB cd drive. is this a generic driver for all of their external usb cd drives? Is it worth downloading it and trying. If so how do I load the drivers and get Win 98 running? This is so annoying.