With some of the old 98 full version disks you could boot off of the disk itself to see the installer run. I always thought that to be odd since the retail disk I bought required booting with a floppy for manually running setup on desktops. The ststement by voyagerfan99 on the other thread is accurate on this.
Ready access to the drive and seeing it list all files with the dir/w command suggests the drive maybe an old 1x/2x cd rom is still able to read. The question now is on the floppy drive being used. Did the laptop come with one in or swap capable where you can easily exchange from one type to another or did you plug in a usb model?
The fact that the installer began to run is encouraging since that shows a good optical drive while running into a snag like a damaged disk or a memory problem. Another thought would be the need for a bios update, new battery if the board takes one, or the likely need for a new cable going to the optical drive. On any old system one small item can cause a number of problems.
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