I hate it when I get stumped

A friend of mine has a Acer TravelMate 506T laptop that I was installing a wireless card in. She can't find her original Win98SE install CD. And I can't find the one I have either. I have a Win98 CD new install CD and a Win98SE upgrade CD but no Win98SE new install CD. I have the CD case and the product key but the disk is missing. So I had to go to the web to get all the files to install the wireless card. At the end of the install the computer locked up. I turned off the computer and restarted. Now Win98 won't start in normal mode. Damn! At this point I need to backup her laptop before I go looking for a bad file. I was going to remove the harddrive and install it as a second drive in my computer to backup the files and to do a virus scan on the drive. But I can't get to the harddrive. This laptop requires the case to be split to accesses the harddrive. I've removed all the screws from the bottom and I can get half of the case to open but there is still something keeping the case from coming apart. On some laptops there are snap latches that will release when pressure is applied. Don't seem to work for this laptop. Any more pressure or prying will probably break something. Damn, damn, damn! I hate it when I get stumped!!