CD DRIVE INSTALL ??

[PaddyO]

I have recently Bought a used gateway solo laptop
pentium 75.. It actually has a floppy and a CD drive that you swap in and out for each other. I only have Dos bare bones installed on this thing..
So does anyone know how to quickly get it to recognize the CD drive, so i can start installing from CD ??

basically is there a cd driver that will work on boot up ?

 

[IamDavid]

Can't ya change the boot order in the bios to boot from cd first?

 

[spurdy]

If you cannot boot from the CD as IamDavid suggests, I would do the following:

1) Obtain a Win98 Startup floppy (created via Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Startup Disk tab).
2) Install the floppy drive and boot from it (whether you choose to boot with or without CD support in the menu that appears is irrelevant at this stage).
3) At the A:\> prompt enter "sys A:\ C:"
4) When that's done and has returned "System Transferred" enter at the A:\> prompt "copy *.* C:\"
5) When the file copy is done shutdown and swap the floppy drive for the CD drive.
6) Power up and choose to boot WITH CD support when prompted.

This should give you access to the CD drive just as if you were booting from the Win98 floppy (which loads a bunch of generic drivers that work on 99+% of systems). After you've booted and have access to the CD drive, clear or delete the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files from your C drive. This is important, otherwise the DOS mode CD drivers will continue to load on subsequent boots, which can on occasion conflict with the native Win98 drivers. (I've seen instances where the CD drive was inaccessible in Win98 until the DOS mode .SYS drivers were removed.) Now start Win98 setup from the CD and you're on your way!

 

[LevcoS]

Do as Spurdy suggested, but instead of "sys c:" do "format c:" followed by "xcopy /E a:\*.* c:", which will copy CD drivers over as well as system files.

LevcoS

 

[spurdy]

Well, formatting will ensure that it's completely clean, true. But unless you use sys.com afterwards it won't boot. Just copying command.com, io.sys, and msdos.sys to the C: drive won't make it bootable. Sys.com specifically places the system files on the boot sector. I'm fairly certain that copy and xcopy can't (it would be bad if you could wipe out your boot sector with a stray copy command), unless the files already exist there (which they won't after a format), in which case they could be overwritten and still be in the correct physical location. Also, as a Win98 startup disk has no subdirectories, the /E switch wouldn't really be necessary.

If you were to tag a /S onto your format command it would basically be doing the same thing as sys.com, so you'd save a few keystrokes I suppose.