I think you are suggesting installing the lappy drive as master in your desktop and formatting the drive and re-installing Win98 from there. This should work but be prepared for lots of "found new hardware" messages when you re-install the 2�" in the lappy. Your sony recovery disk will probably work in your lappy as the 'key' is written into the bios. To be safe tho, go to www.driverguide.com and download their (currently free) program which when run detects all drivers on your machine and makes a back-up of them. Make sure you save this back-up somewhere other than on your lappy HDD as all data on the lappy drive will be deleted when you format the drive.