dramas after formatting 1

[jodilees]

Hi

I have a P2 computer that is a couple of years old now, but serves my purpose at home no problems, until now.

I had a bit of trouble with the bug bear virus that went around and reached a point where non of the virus software or the fixes that I could find were working. I decided after spending some time on the problem to format it. I have done this and now I can't get my windows 98se to reload. The computer boots to dos no problems but does not recognise the cd in the cd drive. But the lights on the side of the cd drive indicate that it is running. So I am at a bit of a lost. If anyone can offer any hints I would really appreciate it. I have tried another win 98 cd and it is not the cd that is causing the drama as the same error message is appearing on a different cd.

Regaards

Jodi

 

[DelphiAaron]

if your booting to a floppy to activate the cd, have you tried booting to the cd..

check in the bios if your pc can boot to cd.. Anywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

 

[jodilees]

Thanks for the reply

Yes I have tried changing the boot sequence both using only the cd rom and changing the sequence to cdrom a: etc.

none of this seems to work, and I also got an error message when I changed the boot sequence saying invalid system disk.

I really don't know what else to try, I have formatted probably 15 computers in the past six months and have never had this happen to me before. This particular computer has been formated 2 times in the past and it has never given me this message before.

Regards

Jodi

 

[dentarthurdent]

You say the machine boots to dos OK, does this mean you are using a boot disk floopy to boot your machine ? If so does it have a dos cd driver on it ? If not your cd drive won't be found.
Some pc's have trouble booting from cd even when it is set to do this in the bios. My advice is to make it simple.
Make a win98 startup disk from another win98 machine.
Boot from it and choose the option to load cd support.
Place the win98 cd in the drive and change to drive letter of the cd.
Type 'setup'.
Win98 install should start.
Let me know how this works out.

Will.

 

[Crustyoldbloke]

Am I reading this correctly? You boot to a system floppy in A:\ and it does it OK, you can see everything on the floppy? - then when you change drive to D:\ nothing happens or does it say invalid drive or something similar?

That being the case I would do as Will describes above abd load WIN98 startup disk and choose setup with CDRom support. Should work OK then. Regards
Phil

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the answers we give are helpful to you. Without your feedback we don't know if the answer was correct.

 

[jodilees]

I have tried using a different boot disk obtained from another win 98 machine. It is now getting through this screen, and I have even seen the start of windows setting up, but then it froze and did not go any further. I did not change the drive letter though as i am not sure how to go about doing this, I am not very dos literate.

I have still not got win 98 on the machine. It was returning the "invalid system disk" message, I read up on it a bit and it mentioned to try typing at the prompt SYS C:, which I did to transfer the system files. This worked as it returned a message to say that it was successful. Now it gets to the a: prompt and when I type setup in to start the win98 cd it thinks for a minute and the cd seems to be working and then the a: prompt returns to the screen.

In amoungst all of this I did try formatting the pc again and this to has not seemed to make any difference.

Anymore light on the subject would be of great help. Thankyou everyone for your replies, they have all been helpful, just need to get through the last barrier I hope!!!!

Regards

Jodi

 

[Win98User]

Just a thought here - If you boot with the A dive your D drive will actually be E drive.

Regards.

 

[jodilees]

Yes I got that thought, it is trying to read from the E drive, and as mentioned before on one occasion I did actually get to the first screen of loading windows, but then the screen froze.

On the first start up screen when it goes through the hardware of the computer it does recognise the cd drive, I also have a cd burner on the pc and it recognises this drive as well. I have also tried putting the windows disk in alternate cd drives, and this does not seem to help either.

Any other ideas. I am sick of using the laptop!!!

Regards

Jodi

 

[wolluf]

If its starting the setup process then freezing, could be a hardware problem. I'd try removing non-essentials to install win98 & if ok put them back later (eg, CD writer, sound/modem/network cards). If it still freezes, check the memory (eg, just use one stick if you have more or use other).

 

[jodilees]

Just a question on that though, wouldn't dos register an error when booting up????

 

[wolluf]

No - dos on boot disk only looks for hard & CD drives (so just need CD ROM, not writer as well) - it doesn't know about other devices. I've used this approach successfully on many occasions when I've had problems trying to install 95 & 98 (as have others looking at posts).

 

[jodilees]

thanks for your help, I will give it a try and let you know how I get on.

Regards

Jodi

 

[Crustyoldbloke]

If you have this on screen:

a:\> type "E:"
a:\>E: hit enter
E:\> type "SETUP" hit enter

I fully agree with the previous posts, this may well have something to do with (almost certainly) effectively 2 CD rom drives.

Every time I have seen this combination, I have seen problems. I suggest that when bach up and running, you only have the CDRW device on the system. Regards
Phil

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the answers we give are helpful to you. Without your feedback we don't know if the answer was correct.

 

[mobyduck]

I've had similar problems in the past especially with CDR drives installed.

I've had some success by physically disconnecting the CDR before starting, then using the freeware utility CDROMGOD - this allows you to create a boot disk with most known CD drivers (an also manages memory as well, sometimes the problem..) You will probably have to try a few of the drivers before you get to one that works for you.

 

[zlito]

Did you try another harddrive? It sounds like your may be bad or going bad. I have a few laying around to try things like that. You can buy used hardrives 500meg to 1 gig for less then $20.00 at computer repair shops. I have not had that virus but I guess it could have damaged the harddrive. Try downloading the utilities from the harddrive makers website. Most of them have programs that will check the drive and tell you if its bad. Try removing the cables from the cdroms and rebooting, a bad cdrom can cause strange things to happen. Do what I do when I can not get something to work, put Madmax in the DVD player and drink a few cokes. Then take a fresh look at it.

 

[cyberdyne]

try giving command from dos
a:\>Fdisk /mbr then try installing the windows
first copy win98 files to hdd to a folder say win98
from there install windwos.

dont try installing from cd. From:
Apoorva Gala
You can mail me at apoo1972@rediffmail.com

 

[jodilees]

ok, have unplugged burner and that has failed, have changed data cable from burner to cd and that has failed, not sure how to save windows files to hdd, dos language very very rusty!

if someone can tell me how to do this probably step by step would be best I would really appreciate it.

Regards

Jodi

 

[Win98User]

I believe it would, in your case you need to do;

xcopy E:\*.*/E/H/S d:


Regards.

 

[jodilees]

does it matter what drive I am in when I type this, and once I have done this what do I do next?

 

[Win98User]

No it doesn't matter what drive you are in - what matters is that drive E is where the Windows CD is - And that drive D is the hard drive.

There is nothing else to do - this should copy the entire diesk to your hard drive.

You then need to go to the hard drive and locate the setup file and just type setup (I believe).

Cyberdyne is right though - you should create a directory called win98.


GO TO D:TYPE md win98

THEN TYPE xcopy E:\*.*/E/H/S d:\win98


Regards.