I have a very old dell latitude cpi.

PII
64mb ram
4gb hdd
cd rom

I managed to get winXPsp2 running on it but not very well. I want to put win98se BACK onto it. My problem is win98se cd rom is non bootable. It's been a long time since I've messed around with win98 but if I remember correctly I need to use a bootable 3.5" floppy. I don't have a floppy drive for this laptop, all I have is the cd rom.

My second problem is the file system is now in NTFS and I have to get it back to FAT32 before even attempting to get win98se back on.

Any help would be appreciated.

simple. ok, now what you need to do is, put in a 3.5" floppy disc. go to my computer, right click on the floppy drive, (usually A and click 'format'. now, when the window pops up, click on the box that says, "make boot-disc" or somethign like that. now, click format. it will take a little while. now, insert the floppy, and restart the computer. go into BIOS and make sure that the computer is set to boot from the floppy before the hdd. now, restart again. you should be able to get into MS DOS. when you are in there, put (hd drive letter):\format (ex. C:\format) and when it asks you if you want to continue, hit y. if i remember correctly.if you cant do it from that floppy, you will need to go online and download the 98 boot floppy.

I appreciate the help but maybe you missed the whole part about not having a 3.5" drive?

You can still download the boot able boot disk onto a CD i think.

How do I do that? What do you mean?

Ok.Try to download the Windows 98SE boot disk from here.Then write it to a Cd-Rom.
link to boot disk