laptop formating w/ floppy/cdrom support

I am new to IT and need to format a hard drive on a IBM Thinkpad that has removable floppy/cd-rom drives. I wish to reinstall with win 98 although I don’t want to format if I can’t have the cd-rom to install with. I have heard of making ghost cd’sbut have no Idea what is involved. I burn’t a copy of a startup disk with noluck in the startup. The Bios gives me no option to boot from cd-rom, only floppy. any advice on this matter would be greatly apreciated.