I had an old Toshiba laptop on which the CD-ROM died, followed not long afterwards by some almighty crash which meant a full format and re-install was needed. Tosh no longer stocked the CD-ROM and specialist obsolete laptop spares places wanted silly money for a second hand replacement.
The solution?
I bought from the States a little adapter which lets you use the 2.5" hard drive from a laptop in your desktop. Install Win98 as it was then onto your hard drive, pop it back in the laptop and voila, one working laptop.
If you fancy giving that a bash I'd be happy to pop the adapter in the post for you to give it a try. Send a private message if your interested.
pilot-lite