laen> The seller made no statement whatsoever about
 laen> an operating system, so I wouldn't be at all
 laen> surprised if there was none.  But if that's
 laen> the case, why does the Windows 98 splash
 laen> display?

because the drive was prepared with a bootable floppy created from a Win98
system... the splash screen is built in to IO.SYS or whatever they are
calling it these days...

)\/(ark