PC O/S Restore

My HP 8565C (Pentium win98) had some problem and I was told to reinstate Win98 from the system recovery CD (supplied by HP). The recovery CD did not had autorun.inf or any starting exe. It will be grateful if any of you can clarify this, even if theCD does not have a starting exe (autorun.exe, etc) how can after reboot, the CD will start by its own. Even HP support told me that this will work even after I recreate the partition. Please HELP