Assign CD Rom drive letter to Install Win 98 on new hard drive 1

[jpbgolf]

How do I assign a drive letter to my CD Rom at DOS to enable installing Windows 98 from a CD? Some background on this is that I have just installed a new hard drive, ran Fdisk and Format. The primary hard disk partition works and the PC boots from the hard drive, C.

The CD Rom controller is enabled in Setup and the CD Rom drive is automaically detected. The primary controller has only the new hard drive, the secondary controller has only the CD Rom drive. No change in this configuration as it had worked with the previous drive which had to be replaced. Mscdex.exe loads at boot up right after the hard drive being recognized. The available drive letters are A for my 3 1/2" floppy drive, C for my primary hard drive partition and B. The B drive does not invoke the CD ROM drive which I thought might. I could always change the drive letter later.

Thanks in advance for suggestions to resolve this.

 

[edfair]

You load the cdrom driver in config.sys, and mscdex from the autoexec.bat. If you have the 98 boot disk, it has generic drivers available that covers about 99% of the possibilities.
If you are doing this from the hard drive you will need to put the drivers on the hard drive and create the config.sys and autoexec.bat
Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[jpbgolf]

Ed, thanks for the reply. I understand your suggestion to have the drivers on the hard drive and load them from autoexec.bat and config.sys. So to specify the drive letter in autoexec.bat would I use a syntax like

if exist TOSCD001 lh c:\windows\command\mscdex /d:TOSCD001 /m:15 /l

and in config.sys the syntax

device=c:\cddrv\taisatap.sys /d:TOSCD001

In the above example, would this then attempt to assign the drive letter D first but then try others (E,F,etc) until it finds an open one?

Thanks again!

 

[edfair]

You don't need to specify the drive letter. If you only have c: partitioned It will be assigned c: and the mscdex will assign the cd to the next lettered drive (d.

in config.sys
device=c:\himem.sys (or location) (required for install)
device=c:\drivername.sys drivername

in autoexec.bat
mscdex drivername

you wouldn't have the drivers in windows yet as you haven't installed the os, and you wouldn't want to put them there since you might be installing from a different version floppy.
This comment based on my use of 95(3 levels) or 98(unknown level) or msdos(6 to 6.22) drivers to do the install.
I do the installs from floppy. It keeps the generated config.sys and autoexec.bat from having extra stuff when windows gets done. If windows sees either in the root it modifies them for windows use, but it doesn't need either in a standard install. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[resources]

Try this link. Nice tool!

http://www.computers.pcc.edu/~troubleshoot/aplus/cdrom.htm

 

[swayda]

I have encountered this problem before and forget why it happened, but there is one more thing you can try. In your config.sys try
lastdrive=z
Don Swayser
swayser@optonline.net

 

[Guest_imported]

I have a similar problem. I ahve installed the necessary drivers for my cd rom, but i cant seem to assign a letter to it. How do i do this?