formatting w98

This term we are going to stop using a major piece of software in our suite (w98) so I thought it would be a good time to format the pcs and reinstall windows. the pcs are about 4 years old and are not going to be replaced in the forseeable future. However, they don't have cd drives and I am trying to think of a way of formatting etc without openning up the boxes and using a spare harddrive, the boxes have a very brittle plastic front that has to be forced off to gain access to the insides and then thumped back on - not difficult but something I try to avoid. So I thought I would use partitioning software to create an additional drive, copy w98 to it, format the c drive and install from what would be the d drive. How feasible is this and is there any free partitioning software that doesn't delete/destroy data etc that anyone can recommend?

Don't you have any imaging software?!!! How about just using the Win 98 boot floppy for the format operation, or even setting up a RIS server, modifying the script and having it format the drive in FAT 32 (I think it's possible)? If you don't have a bootdiskyou can download one from www.bootdisk.com. Apart from that the only thing I can think of would be to use an external CD\DVD drive to copy the files back over once formatted. How did you do re-imaging before?

You can image over the network using other [free] tools besides ris. It's all a bit painful with floppy disks tho'.

There's partition resizer: http://zeleps.com/

They were like that when i got there! I could use an external cd drive I suppose I could put usb drivers on the bootdisk (which I have by the way thanks)

You can copy the win98 folder to the drive (via network) and then deltree all the other folders and run setup from the directory you copied the install files to. Thats roughly how to do it, but its been a while since I did it.

What ever method you use check out the batch tool to do an unattended setup of 98.
If you can go USB drive then that would probably be best. Apart from that a boot disk that will format your HD, map a share to a network drive, copy over all the files then start an unattended setup should be fairly easy to achieve.
Check out this article near the bottom it will give you the batch script you need to achieve this.

Thanks for the suggestions, once I've got one of the pcs formatted and set up I'm going to try ghosting, however I only have ghost 2003 which doesn't seem to support anything I want to do! I can't ask for money to buy corporate ghost because the head has a panic attack when I ask for funds however little.
So I have to make do with free stuff or blood sweat and tears.