I have an old Pentium 2 laptop that I would like to install Windows 98 on. The CD drive doesn't work unfortunately, which complicates things a bit. I do have one of those USB adapters to connect the IDE hard drive to my MacBook. I can successfully see the contents of the drive, and write to it. It currently has two partitions. Is there a way to install Windows 98 on that hard drive with what I have? I can copy a Windows 98 installation CD to the hard drive, but I would need to make it bootable first so I can boot the laptop and start the installation.

What I tried so far: When I got the laptop it had a French, and somewhat broken Windows 98 install on it, and I want to do a fresh install a fresh in English. I had a Windows 98 bootable floppy disk that I used to boot the laptop, and format the hard drive. (I formatted it because the W98 install complained that there was already an operating system present.) Using the USB adapter, I copied a W98 install CD to the second partition. I booted the laptop from the floppy, and started the installation from the second partition. During the install, it wanted to make a new W98 bootable floppy. I used the same floppy (mistake!), but creating the bootable floppy failed (and as it turned out, broke my bootable floppy). The W98 install failed at around 95% saying it couldn't read a certain file. So now I no longer have a floppy left to boot from, and the W98 failed, so it also won't boot from the hard drive. I don't have currently have access to another PC with a floppy drive, so I can't make a new bootable floppy.

Does anyone have any ideas how to continue? Ideally without buying anything else. The only possibility I see is to make the hard drive bootable from my Mac while plugged in to the USB adapter. That way I can at least boot into MS DOS and start the W98 install. I still have to figure out why it failed at 95% but at least I'd be a step further.