reformatting an hp omnibook 6000
 

One of my friends from school asked me if i would take a look at his notebook for him. He's got an HP Omnibook 6000 running Windows 98 SE, and for some reason whenever you boot the computer it stalls at the screen with the sky and the Windows 98 logo. The computer will boot successfully in safe mode, but i can't configure the network access components as he bought the pc used, and there are all sorts of verifications, passes, and encryptions that i have no idea what to do with.

I was going to reformat the laptop, but it doesn't have a cd drive or a floppy bay. He bought an external cd burner to try to help this difficulty, but with Windows 98 I would have to install the USB drivers for the cd drive.

Basically, what I'm getting at is:
1. would the cd drive/floppy drive from my desktop have the same bus as the laptop, and would they be compatible?

2. if not, where can i find a decent floppy module? i tried froogle, egghead, and tigerdirect, and i haven't had much success.

3. could i take out the hard drive, hook it up to my desktop and reformat it?

wow, thanks for the help. no worries, got it working (98 setup files were on hard disk, just had to change some os version files --win.com and winver.exe)