CD Drive Error

[mslaffsalot]

I am working on a customers Gateway PC. I had to run gwscan, per gateway direction to be able to load win98. Here are the steps I have taken:

1. ran Gateway's gwscan.exe
2. fdisk
3. format
4.when I try to run setup.exe, I get this error msg.:
CDR101:Not ready reading drive E
Abort, Retry, Fail? (I hit f)
Fail on INT 24 - Win98


Help! What do I do now? I would appreciate any tips, my customer wants their computer on Sat.
Thank You,
Tracey

 

[JohnS9051]

Tracey,
I don't know how much experience you have, so I must assume it is limited. No offense is intended.
I assume you are trying to install Win98 from the DOS prompt without the original boot disk.
The boot disk you are using probably doesn't load the DOS CD-ROM driver therefore you can't access the CD.
If you have another computer with Win98 installed, make a start-up disk from Start-Settings-Control Panel-Add/Remove Programs-Startup Disk tab.
Booting with this Startup Disk will install a generic CD-ROM driver and allow you to run setup.exe from the CD.
At the A:\ prompt type E: where E: is your CD-ROM drive letter. example A:\E: not A:\cd E:At the E:\ prompt type setup.
If you have a CD-ROM and a CDR/RW installed make sure you choose the correct drive letter
Hope this helps. Good luck.
John

 

[Guest_imported]

The computer is fixed and back to the customer.

It was NOT the CDROM drive, but a bad hard drive. What I did was pull a HD from a working computer and put it in the problem machine and booted it up. The computer worked like a charm and the CD drive played a audio CD no problem. So, since I alrady had the HD out of the good machine, I though maybe I could load the OS on it and then swap back hard drives. Well, when I turned on the good machine, everything locked up and the system alarm went off and only turning off the computer would stop it. So I got one of the spare hard drives I have from scrapped machines in my shop. I ran fdisk, format and loaded the OS no problem, swapped the hard drives and the cutomers computer runs like a charm.

Now the reason this machine came into my shop was that a Trojan virus was downloaded and started corrupting the HD.

Thank you everyone for thie tips, but we all were wrong, just addressing the CDROM error message....sometimes it isn't the CDROM drive at all!

Tracey A Angevine
Owner
Unique Computer Concepts
A+. MCSE, CNE