Are you trying to boot from a CD-R, or the original Windows 98 installation disk?

Does the system still boot - can you read the CD you are trying to boot from?
Can you read other CDs?

You shouldn't need "drivers" (or any OS) to install W98 from CD.
I just did this a few days ago under PCEM from a .ISO of Win98-2 CD to a freshly created
blank hard drive image - it would be the same on real hardware.

If the BIOS offers the option to boot from CD, it will have it's own internal low-level
CD drivers - it won't need anything else.

Does the CD spin-up and get read when you try booting .. perhaps the CD doesn't have a
boot - do you have any other bootable CD's you can try? - WinXP, Win7, Linux etc.
(You don't have to actually install whatever the CD is - just trying to confirm that
booting from CD works)

Do you know why the floppy doesn't work? - Have you tried cleaning it?
The reason I ask, is that if you have another workings system with a floppy, I
could send you a floppy image of DOS with CD drivers (assuming it's an IDE-CD)
that you could boot and see if the CD works

itsmelindsey wrote on 2025-08-29, 06:51:

Can I install windows by doing any of the following, and if so, please tell me how (like you're talking to a 5-year-old please) […]
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Can I install windows by doing any of the following, and if so, please tell me how (like you're talking to a 5-year-old please)
- Copy the contents of the boot floppy to a hard drive partition and use that to install from the windows cd
- Copy over the cd-rom drivers to allow me to boot from CD
- Copy windows98 to the hard drive and install from there?

You can't do any of those... Hard drives need an MBR record to be recognised as a boot drive, CD-ROM drivers are needed but need a bootable DOS first.

Unless your BIOS can be set to boot from CD...

Step I would take:
1) If the floppy drive doesn't work, take out the hard drive and put it in a computer with a working floppy drive.
2) If it's the only HDD in the computer, create an MS or PC-DOS boot disk. PC-DOS is IBM. Boot from the disk.
3) Format the drive with "format c: /q /s". /s creates the MBR record and copies command.com. Install PC-DOS or MS-DOS or just copy the DOS files over to the drive, including autoexec.bat & config.sys.
4) Edit autoexec.bat & config.sys to load one of the CD-ROM drivers (ask if you need help with that), or install CD-ROM drivers from a floppy disk.
5) Install the HDD in the IBM Thinkpad. Boot to DOS. Test CD-ROM drivers load correctly. Boot from the Win98 CD.

Thank you so much wonderful people, turns out my floppy drive just needed the write heads cleaned and I'd accidentally written by CD-R in 2x instead of 1x speed. I created a boot floppy and installed 98SE directly then installed 380XD drivers but wasn't happy with the level of hardware compatibility, so I installed from the 98FE 385XD recovery disk on archive and I'm using the updates disk to get to FE. I can confirm that you don't need a boot floppy to install 98FE from the 385XD recovery disk. In the middle of the SE upgrade now, fingers crossed. Thank you again everyone!

Good to hear. Glad things worked out.

Seems the only question remaining is why it didn't boot from CD (if you still care) - perhaps this is related to the 2x/1x thing.
I'm assuming you made a new CD at 1x - did that one boot? You shouldn't have needed to go to floppies. (As noted before, I
recently confirmed that at least the "2nd edition" W98 CD boots).