Originally Posted by PC eye

I'm just wondering how good the memory is in the old laptop. Besides the optical drive you may have some bad ram if there's nothing wrong like scratches or finger marks found on the 98 cd itself.

The other problem is your reference to the drive letter "E:\". The old dos based program installers always look for the default "D" when thinking cd rom. But even with "Z" that wouldn't see the installer simply lock up. Is this a full install or an upgrade or recovery disk that you are trying this with?