Solved: formatted dell laptop, no cdrom detected

Well I have looked there and no luck, it is not as simple as that anyway. I need to know how to load a driver without cdrom support. I have tried booting with 98se bootdisk and entering cdsetup, it doesn't see the driver that someone told me to use.
I need someone to tell me what drivers to use and what to type at a: prompt. so far what I have been told to do is not working.
WARNING: Do not ever format a laptop with swappable drives without knowing how or having the neccessary files on floppy disks, you lose all drivers when you do this.
Little late for me, but maybe I can stop someone else from making that mistake.

Hi A Hawk, I can't use the cd rom at all. When I formatted the hard drive it lost the drivers for the cd rom. I have to load these drivers and know how to do that in the A: prompt only. Let me say what I have done so far. I made a 98SE boot disk and put mscdex.exe file and cdsetup.exe. When I boot up, I select startup without cd support(since I dont have any) and in the A: promt, I type cdsetup and it is suppose to load those drivers but it doesn't. It gives me a message like Insert disk in setup A: or setupB:and put in that disk. I even tried to put those two files on a seperate disk and insert it in when told to do, but that doesn't work either. I never heard of B: prompt. I just do not know what to do.

I will give that a try.
copy a:mscdex.exe c:\windows\dos
copy a:cdsetup.exe c:\windows\dos
sounds like that would copy them to the c drive that way.
Thanks for the advice. I will let yall know if that works in a couple of hours, still at work right now. This laptop had windows me on it and was trying to load win 2000, but it will not work on this old of a laptop. I should of left things well enough alone, but I fireworks and flash programs will not work with windows me, as a lot of programs are not accepting win me.

Well that is not working either.
I don't know what to do. someone please help me.............................

well the c doesn't work. I thought why don't I try the c: prompt like this
c: copy autoexec.bat and it said copied 1 file
then tried c:cdsetup.exe and that copied as well
but still not seeing cd rom
any more suggestions

well killowatt1 i got as far as enter x: but it says invalid drive, now what?

Ok I am so stressed, I didn't realize what you meant by x:, I will try this stuff out tonight. I will post back this evening.

Well I just got through and It has loaded windows me again. I have learned a lot about dos through this and laptops/formatting. Is this what you have to do ever time you format a laptop with swappable drives. Thanks sooooooooooooooooo much. You are a lifesaver kilowatt. I learn something everyday. I'm so glad you stopped in to have a look at my thread. I hope this helps someone else out in the future.
Thanks again.