Big Headache with External CD ROM

[markjj]

Now I know someone out there can answer this one for me so who can rise to the challenge?
I have a HP Omnibook 5500 laptop and have had to replace the hard drive. The trouble is I have an external CD ROM drive linked to the parallel port. I have tried booting from the Win '98 start up disk but it only installs generic cd rom drivers, not the appropriate drivers for the CD Drive (Bantam Backpack)which I have separately on floppy. I get a message telling me the cd rom is not ready or not installed and I cannot continue the installation any further. How do I get the (seperate) drivers installed so that I can commence Win'98 installation from the CD?

[Paleo Pete]

When you boot to the Start Up disk try Command Prompt Only instead of Start Computer with CD ROM Support. Install the CD ROM drivers from the DOS prompt, and make sure you have DOS drivers, then reboot.

You might have to copy the system files if the hard drive is not bootable, since to do it this way you have to let autoexec.bat run, so you can't boot to the Start Up disk after installing drivers. sys c: will do that, at the A:\> prompt. Remember to put a space before c. That will let the machine boot to the hard drive so CD ROM is accessible to run the installation.

I would copy the win98 installation files to the hard drive and install from there, instead of from CD ROM. You still have to have the CD ROM working, but installation should be faster. Also you won't have to dig out the Windows CD to install other hardware later, etc. Windows will automatically look in the folder it was installed from.

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[markjj]

Cheers Pete. I'll give it a try.
Thanks for troubling to reply. Mark.

[Daniel J Matthews]

Go to my computer right click on it go to propiteies go to the device manager tab and then to the CDROM tab and install the drivers or if that dont work go to Add new hard ware. Let it search and if it appears show ti the drivers