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PeteJohnston · Fri Feb 28, 2003 1:56 pm

I had a bit of a problem on my old PC which I thought I could solve by reformatting my hard drive and doing a clean instal of WIN2K but when I try to do this the PC says it doesn't recognise the CD drive.

The PC originally had WIN95 on it, but that was about 6 years ago. I thought that if there were drivers missing I would find them on the original CD and copy them to a floppy but I haven't a clue about which files and what to do with them once I've copied them.

Does anyone have any pointers as to what I should try?

omega · Fri Feb 28, 2003 2:55 pm

I would suggest making boot floppies. It worked for me. That is, if you have access to another machine.

In the \bootdisk directory on the win2k cd there is makeboot.exe. You need 4 floppies. It takes a long time to boot from the floppies, but it seems to work better on old hardware.

dolemitecomputers · Fri Feb 28, 2003 2:58 pm

You mean in the BIOS the cdrom drive does not show up? You might want to check the data cable just to make sure it is seated fine. You should be able to also boot to the cd if the drive is shown in the BIOS.

absurdity · Fri Feb 28, 2003 3:20 pm

If the machine is really as old as you say, it's quite possible that there is no option to boot off of the CD-ROM in the BIOS. Go with omega's suggestion and try the boot floppies.

PeteJohnston · Sat Mar 01, 2003 5:54 am

I don't remember if I tried to boot from CD or not, but I think I did. It didn't work so I tried to go to D:\ from the DOS command line so that I could run SETUP.EXE and it was at that point that it said it couldn't find the CD drive, only A:\ and C:\. How do you change the BIOS to boot from the CD? If I can change it I'll try booting it again with the CD in the drive and if that doesn't work, I'll try omega's option.

dolemitecomputers · Sat Mar 01, 2003 8:36 am

All you can do then is create a boot disk from windows 98 or ME and that will let you boot with cdrom drivers. With windows 2000 you can't run the setup program from within DOS so you will have to run winnt from the I386 folder.

etilena · Sat Mar 01, 2003 8:59 am

It could be possible your CDROM drive is dead. Happened to one of my friend's computers while I was trying to reinstall windows for him. You might want to check if the CDROM still works.

etilena · Sat Mar 01, 2003 9:13 am

PS: If your computer is old enough to not have the CDROM as a boot option, installing Win2k will only kill the performance. Even Win98 on some older computers can feel really slow. So you might just consider keepin Win95

fc34 · Mon Mar 03, 2003 5:54 am

Perhaps it is not configured to boot from the CD-ROM. Play around with the BIOS a little, and see if there is an option for boot. What version of BIOS r u using...that could help a bunch.

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