I re-read your original post. You stated that someone has already installed an upgrade from W95 to W98. And from that I get that the CD-rom doesn't work and you wish to install an operating system with the floppy disk drive.

98 or later cannot be just installed with a floppy disk drive. A preinstalled operating system can sometimes be booted by a floppy disk boot up program..that is all.

The laptop is old and the bios cannot be set to boot to a flash drive or an external harddrive so that too is out of the question.

What you might try doing is connecting it to another computer as a slave by the USB (not sure if it has one) and checking it out to see if the harddrive is loaded with an operating system or is even in working order.

Let us know and we can go on from there!