Cannot get to my CD Drive when booting from a floppy 3

[Greggy]

If any one out there can help me on this I'd be grateful. I have a PC which was running Windows 95, and I tried to doublespace the disk. This had bad results and caused the PC tobehave erratically. So, I decided to re-install Win 95. I created a bootable floppy which I booted up from, however I could not get to my D: drive (CD) to re-install from, it says the drive is unassigned (can't remember the exact wording). When booting up it does detect the CD. Worse still is that the PC now won't boot up via the hard drive, it keeps asking for the CLI (eg. COMMAND.COM) and nothing I type in works. All I want to do is to re-install WIN 95!! Can anybody help me please. Many thanks in advance.

 

[wolluf]

How did you create bootable floppy? From within win95? - because such disks do not have CD ROM support. If this is the case, go to

http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html

and download a win95 boot floppy with CD ROM support.

 

[Greggy]

Wolluf, That's exactly what I did. I just formatted a floppy with the system files (from when I could actually use Win 95). I've now downloaded 2 of the boot files from the site you gave me and I'll try those. Many thanks for your help on this.
Incidently, to re-install Win 95 do I need to format my C: drive, and if so, is there a special method for doing this.
Again, many thanks. I hope this sorts it.

 

[edfair]

No, you don't need to reformat. But you will have problems installing if you don't because 95 doesn't like installing over the top of itself. If you put deltree on the floppy you could use it to delete the windows directory, but it takes as much time as formatting.
If you have room on your hard drive you might want to put the install stuff from the CD in an install directory, it speeds the install significantly.
Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[Greggy]

Thanks very much everyone. I've got a couple of boot disks now which, hopefully, will give me access to the CD drive. I'll be trying it tonight. Cheers.

 

[Greggy]

Well guys, I used the boot up CD and it worked a treat. Things never go smoothly though do they? I formatted the c: drive, placed the Win 95 disk in the CD and ran setup. Every time it gets upto accepting the license agreement details, and when accepted, the PC gives a little blip noise and the whole thing hangs!!! I've never known anything so frustrating. If any of you guys have experienced this and know a work-a-round I would, again, be most grateful. Cheers in advance.

 

[edfair]

Time to reboot and run fdisk and report back the filesystem and active flag.
You can also get some hardware faults that affect the loading.
What boot disk are you using? And what system are you trying to load? Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[Greggy]

I've run scandisk on the C: drive and this reported no errors.
When I run fdisk it gives me a series of options about creating/deleting partitions.
The information it gives is:

Partition: C:1
Status : A
Type : PRI DOS
Volume label: HARD-DISK
Mbytes: 2047
System: FAT16
Usage 84%

I'm afraid I have no idea what that means.

The boot disk was downloaded from the site mentioned in the post. Hope you can help me some more.
Cheers

 

[edfair]

Ok , you have a valid c:, with 2.1gb using fat16 active (16 bit cluster addressing) taking up 84% of your roughly 3 gb hard drive.
This is a start. I've got to think back if B or C (two 95 versions) use different media descriptors than earlier 95.

How about booting the floppy again , do a directory of d: (your CD) and tell us the date of the setup file. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[Greggy]

Edfair, thanks for your help on this. The setup.exe has details of :-

setup.exe 3,664 05-01-97 12:14p

in the top directory


In the d:\win95 directory it is

setup.exe 5,185 05-01-97 12:14p

I've tried using both the exe's to install.

 

[Greggy]

Edfair, thanks for your help on this. I've got to go off-line now but I'll check in in the morning to see if you have any words of wisdom. Thanks again.

 

[edfair]

You're trying to install 95B.
Try booting again, fdisk and remove the partition, then create it again, but don't format.

Reboot and move to the d: (CD) and setup.

This will put your 95B in charge of the format.

If it fails there , remove the partition again, make your CD bootable, and try again. B & C were bootable weren't they?

And don't forget the thanks to Wolluf, he's sitting on your shoulder too. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.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.

 

[Greggy]

Edfair, thanks for that, I'll try it. I don't think the CD is bootable though? Is there a way of making it so? My A: and D: drives can be booted from but the Win95 disk won't boot up the PC will it?
I haven't forgotten the help that Wolluf gave, if it wasn't for him I wouldn't even be reading a CD. Many thanks to the both of you.
I'll be trying it later on tonight.

 

[wolluf]

I'd just add one thing to Ed's comments - if you still have a problem. Have you still got the original win95 boot floppy you created when 95 still working? If so, boot from that & use fdisk to delete & create new partition (enable large disk support in fdisk, so it creates a fat32 partition and uses all your drive - from date of setup.exe you've certainly got version of 95 that supports fat32 - osr 2.1 I think), reboot to same floppy & format it.
Now boot from floppy with CD support & try setup again.

PS. I don't know if your version of win95 install CD is bootable - the one before it (OSR2 - dated August 1996) certainly isn't.

 

[Greggy]

Ed Fair & Wolluf, hi there my friends. Just thought I'd let you know that the problem has been sorted now. I posted on the Windows 95 board as well and a chappie called CZAstro came up with the answer. I needed to disable the virus checking in the machines CMOS, did this and setup just sailed through. Thanks for the time and effort you put in in helping me out, it was much appreciated.
Cheers

 

[wolluf]

I always do that when installing o/s (so didn't even think of it!). Glad you're all sorted.

 

[ceh4702]

IF YOU HAVE WIN 95B version of windows you should use the extended support in FDISK and rewrite the MSDOS partition for FAT32 and then reformat. FAT 32 WORKS a little better for storage.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[tommarsh]

try creating a boot disk on a Win98 computer - it'll give you CD support. Run fdisk and delete all partitions, create one FAT 32 partition, restart, then format c: /s
reboot
then you could make a directory on the C:\ and copy *.* from the Win98 folder on the cd, into your new dir-then run setup from there.
if you need step by step-let me know.
if you're using win95 A (fat 16) let me know because i have a 3rd party overlay that will allow you to bridge the 2bg limit for recognizing hard drives. it's very fast and easy to use.
good luck
Tom