Usb or ?

[suzyq67]

I have a laptop and can't seem to find a cd rom for it...its not that old...but everyone I call says they can't get it....I called IBM but they want nearly 300 dollars for it. So here is the problem I can buy an external USB or external SCSI a helluva lot cheaper...but which one would be best. My laptop is in need of formating so the cdrom needs to be recognized in dos to allow the installation of windows.
Thanks for your help in advance.

[NDD]

the cdrom needs to be recognized in dos
I guess this one pretty much narrows the choices to one ... USB doesn't work in DOS :(

[Midknyte]

You could always get an IDE adapter for the hard drive and plug it into a desktop. I think they run about $10-15. It's just a double ended connector with the laptop HDD on one end and a 40-pin IDE on the other. There is also a molex connector for power. If your system is an IBM, those hard drives may be hard to get out but that really depends on the model.

Another idea is to load your setup files onto a zip disk and connect a parallel zip drive to your system. there are dos drivers for parallel zip drives out there. I've had to do that to load win95 onto a toshiba before and it worked just fine. Getting programs on there after that was kinda hard, but I used a network card to connect to a desktop to access files. Installing the OS is the hardest part. :D

[Nick CPU]

Abstract sollution: install windows 95 on floopy and upgarde to 98 with external cd

[Midknyte]

The only problem is that win95 usb support was sparse at best. Even if she gets a usb cdrom drive, it probably won't work on win95.

So far, it looks like either a pc card or parallel cdrom would be the best choices. :(

[Shinta]

whats the model and #?

i know a few people who have ibm laptops who dont wanna let toss them out but they dont use them :O