i have a laptop with Red Hat installed on it. the floppy bay is broken. im LOOKING for a way to fdisk, format, or debug this system without floppy support. i tried booting from a bootable windows xp cdrom at start up. but it just loads redhat normally EVERYTIME. and i did CHANGE the bios boot order. i just need a way to get linux off, and xp on, without floppy support. someone suggested running windows from inside linux. but im having trouble MOUNTING my cdrom as well...

the real question is.. how do i get bios to find my USB external floppy drive so i can access a 98 boot disk??First even if you could run Windows from within Linux you would still not be able to fdisk / format because you can't perform those operations from the same drive they are running on.
Second in order for the BIOS to be able to boot from the external HDD it needs to be supported by that MBoard so check your docs or visit the manuf. site.
Third when you switched the laptop to boot to CDRom first did you hit F10 to save that setting before you exited the BIOS ? ?
It should work. There is a scroll MESAGE on the bottom of the screen that says press any key to boot from CD on your next boot.
Also your XP CD has to be a genuine...a copied one normally won't work.

Let us know...

patio.