Dell Latitude (hell ya baby!)
Man! You have to love the fact that the people who designed this model assumed you would never need both a floppy and cdrom at the same time. Ok, follow these steps to install 98 in this scenerio.
1) Put in floppy drive and bootup with the 98 disk. Prompt to load w/o cdrom support (why? You don't have one yet)
2) FDISK if you need too
3) format using the system parameter. (ex. Format c: /s )
Note: This loads all the config files for msdos....you don't need the floppy to boot anymore. Also, make sure that you have format.com on that floppy (windows boot disks sometimes doesn't include that tool....God knows why?) If you don't have it...go to the machine that is running Win98 and do a find for files or folders and search for format.com and look in the c:....then copy it over to the boot disk.
4) Shutdown the system and switch out the drives for the cdrom.
5) Restart and allow the system to boot into msdos.
6) Once you have the a: flashing on the screen, switch over to the cdrom (cd d:) this should work as long as msdex is loaded (I don't remember if it does or not so pray to god you don't get an invalid drive specification)
7) From there......go to the win98 folder (cd win98) and type setup
If all this doesn't work.....you need to go to the BIOS and check under the cmos configuration that the primary or secondary boot device is set for the cdrom. Dell Latitude's can boot from the cdrom as well as Windows 98. If you put the drive in with the cd, boot up, and it doesn't ask you to hit enter to boot from cdrom (just says, please insert system disk or whatever, you don't have the bios settings right.
Note: You cannot hot swap those drives.....it will simply say that it is an invalid drive specification because the bios didn't detect the damn thing during boot (duh!!).
Note: If all else fails....make sure the bios has the cdrom set for a boot device. Once this is done, put in the cdrom drive as well as the 98 cd. Finnaly just boot the box and hit enter when it prompts to boot from the cd.
Let me know if you need more help
Cordially,
Sp1d3r