New Installation

[gav]

Help needed again!!

I have just bought a second hand PC. It has its hard drive wiped clean. It is a dell optiplex G1 450mhz...so its nothing special. I am trying to install NT onto it and I am struggling. I know a little about PC's but not much !
I have booted the machine from a 98 folppy I have and I have again formated C: however I think the CD rom drivers are missing as I can not read from the cd drive. The CD drive functions fine electrically it just I can't see it. I have it set in the bios to boot from cd first. I have the drivers which I downloaded off the net (although I am not sure what to do with them without having a functioning C drive)
I have done this before and it worked fine last time and the cd drivers were found ok, but this machine seems different

Any help appreciated

Cheers

Gav

[pave_spectre]

Booting from the CD occurs before drivers are loaded and just requires a BIOS that supports it.

Is the BIOS set to autodetect all the drives?

During the POST does the BIOS list the hard drive and optical drive as being detected?

[Budfred]

Does your Win98 boot floppy have CD support?? If not, go to Bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com/) and download one that does, then try it....

[Abbadon]

Originally posted by Budfred
Does your Win98 boot floppy have CD support?? If not, go to Bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com/) and download one that does, then try it....

And if you should try this: bootdisk.com floppys designate the letter "R" to your cd-drive, so from dosprompt go

a:\r:
r:\setup

that should get the ball roling

[gav]

Guys,

I have just looked in the bios screen....should I be able to see the CD listed as I can't. The only reference I have to a CD is the boot sequence which is set to boot from CD first
I have looked at the 98 boot disk whic I have used several times and this shows "oakcdrom.sys" so I guess that has cd support

G

[pave_spectre]

In BIOS usually the first menu option has the list of drives. Primary master should be the hard drive, and the CD-ROM will depend on which cable it is connected to. There should be two entries, both preferably AUTO.

oakcdrom.sys sounds like a specific brand driver. Try the bootdisk.com version which should have a generic driver that will work with most cd-roms.

[Abbadon]

if you can't see the cd-drive in bios, open the case and check the cabling.

[gav]

I have checked my cabling and it is as follows;

IDE1 connects to Hard drives
IDE2 connects to CD Rom Drive

In the bios I have both HDD being recognised (type is set to AUTO)
Under secondary I have nothing for both drive 0 and drive 1 (type is set to none)

[pave_spectre]

Try setting the secondary to auto as well and see what happens.

[gav]

Well,

I have downloaded a bootdisc from the link in one of the replies. It still does as before. I can get to an A prompt, I can change to a D prompt (which it says is RAM Drive) but I can't see the CD still. During the boot up from floppy it says that there was no suitable CD driver loaded?? It looks for an ATAPI OAK Technology driver initially and does not find it. At the end of the floppy boot it says MSCD001 device driver not found. No valid CD rom device drivers selected.

Any other suggestions welcome

G

[pave_spectre]

When you dowloaded the bootdisk did you run the file and let it create a brand new boot disk? I dont recall that mine tried to look for an OAK driver.

If you have tried setting the secondary in BIOS to auto and it still isnt picking the drive up you might want to swap it for a known working drive to see if it might be a problem with the drive itself.


-EDIT-
Just checked and it does indeed contain OAKCDROM.SYS. So much for that thought.

[gav]

Everyone,

Thanks for your help. It turned out to be a defective cable from the CD rom to the motherboard. I took it out of another computer to prove it worked and I was fine from there on in.

Thanks again for all your help...an invaluable aid to a novice such as myself.

P.S. Do you guys get paid for this advice?

G

[Budfred]

We collect good kharma for any and all suggestions, but get deducted kharma points for rants about touchy subjects...:D :rolleyes: :D In other words, we are all volunteers around here....

[Abbadon]

I like to think of it as: "reaping what you've sown".

We help people, people help us, we all help each other. ;)