These days, life is simple... compared to the old (Dos/Windows) days anyway. Yesterday I had someone visiting me with an old notebook he wanted to sell. The old Dell was getting really slow and he now owned a new notebook. So he wanted to reinstall the old Windows 98 on this notebook...
Only problem he had was that the notebook did not boot from the CD. It would boot from the diskdrive, but his Windows version was on a CD. The notebook was equiped with only one bay for the CD or the diskdrive. But how could he start from de startdisk and then switch to CD?
I helped him format the Harddisk, move the CD-driver stuff to the harddisk and boot from the harddisk with the cd-drive in the bay. Then we could install windows.
I really felt old explaining to him how it was in the days of ISA-cards with jumpers for the I/O and IRQ settings. How one had to modify the config.sys and autoexec.bat and pray that card would work and not conflict with other hardware.
The process of installing windows 98 took quite some time. If I would have to charge him for my help, the notebook would have been a total-loss.