Do you have more than one CD-ROM drive and is one or more a CD burner/DVD player as well?
One regular CD-ROM drive and one CD-burner
And do you have more than one Hard Drive?
2 physical hard drives - the first (master) is partitioned into 3 logical drives and the 2nd is partitioned into 2 drives
If so, it may not be assigning a drive letter beyond E: and your CD-ROM drive may be being skipped.
- C:\ D:\ and E:\ are the first hard drive.
- The burner is registering as F:\ and the CD-ROM is G:\
- H:\ and I:\ are on the second hard drive
In DOS I tried changing the directories to each of the drive letters and it couldn't find anything except the A:\ drive. Although one time I got to the WINXP drive and read the directory. I tried to use the setup.exe but it said XP would not boot from DOS
Are you posting from the problem PC now? If so, what OS is loading for you now?
OK Yes I am posting from the same PC. I was smart enough to not format both hard drives at the same time so I booted the machine back into XP. Here is where I am confused.
I think the C:\ drive is loaded with WIN98. I initially put this on in the hopes of loading WinME as the upgrade. ME didn't work. So I put on WIN XP Pro and for some really weird reason that I don't understand XP installed on the D:\ drive - I think.
When I boot I am given the choice now to boot in Win98 or XP. I would like to get rid of 98 but only if I can be sure that I can get XP on alone. I want to install it on the C drive (where I think 98 is right now) Is there a way to find out which drive has which OS?
If it is Windows family OS you can load the XP Pro CD after bootup and start the install process. It will go through its process as though it booted from the CD.
So if I boot onto the C drive (where I think WIN98 is) will it delete the WIN 98? I don't mind if it does. I want it to.
Can I make a boot disk for XP andf include the drivers for the CD-ROM? Would that work?
If the CD Rom drives aren't showing up in the version of Windows you have loaded, you may have the jumpers that set Master, Slave, or Cable Select incorrectly configured.
Jumpers seem to be OK. When I go into Explorer it shows all the drives now. I had to fiddle with the jumpers to get the BIOS to see them but they seem to be OK now.
Let me know if any of this makes better sense of what you are seeing.
Yup it makes sense. It sounds like I am doing the right things.
Hmmm I just thought of something. WIN XP Pro has a handy partitioning program. Don't know if you know about this. It formatted the 2 logical drives on the second hard drive as NTFS instead of FAT. So when I was looking for the hard drives from the A:\ it told me they could not access them because of the way they were partitioned. Seems DOS can't read the NTFS formatted drives.
And the other thing I discovered was that WINXP hates DOS and won't load from it.
Well I took my meds and now have to get to bed before I fall over the keyboard.
One more thing. I have a WIN98 boot disk. It has the CD driver. If I put the driver on another disk and tried to boot with just XP do you think it might work?
