- CMOS & CD drive -

This is so hard... I just bought a pentium 2 metrobook 2 off ebay.. I know...I know... I should expect quality for what I paid for   ... I don't know what to do- I've tried everything.. See I know the problem but I don't want to pay somebody to do it..   The metrobook doesn't recognize the CD drive.. The guy that sold it to me, said all you have to do is install the OS on it and it will work... Well the metrobook won't auto detect the CD drive ethier- I went into the CMOS and tried to put it under auto detect but it just wouldn't stick.. The selection sticks on the manual option...but I don't know what to put in the DOS to manually install the cd drive.. other than that its fine.. I've been trying to install windows 98 for the past few days - really fatigued because I don't know what else to do with it.. Got the boot disk.. When I try fdisk it just says "No fixed disks present" When I try to switch to C:\ it says "Invalid drive specification. Same thing when I try to switch to drive D:\ ... command setup:"Command Search Directory Bad" MD(make drive) "Required Parameter Missing" CD(create drive)it says this exactly "A> (nextline)A:\(nextline)A>_"... Please someone help me.. :-/

First of all, the commands MD and CD do not mean make drive and create drive. They mean make directory and change directory. The boot disk should have been created with cdrom support. If it wasn't, make a new one. On boot up you must watch the boot process carefully. It should tell you the drive letters used for (1) a ram drive that it creates and (2) the drive letter of the cdrom. It will not necessarily be D. Insert your windows cd and switch to the drive letter specified. If successful,  type setup and hit the enter key. If window then fails to detect a hard drive, either there is not one or it is non functional. A word of caution: make sure the boot disk is write protected just in case there is a hard drive that has a virus on. You don't want it to infect your boot disk. It cannot infect your windows cd.

I would first make sure I have a clean Win98 EBR floppy, then boot to it like he says. In the BIOS, make sure you have your primary hard drive set so it recognises, it sounds like you either have a bad drive or one without a valid FAT16 or FAT32 partition, or you just have the BIOS set not to see the hard drive. Insure that both channels of the IDE adapter are ON. Also make sure your boot order is set to floppy, first HD, then CD if there is a boot option order.

Once you have the HD set (either manually or automatically), you should be able to boot to the A: floppy and recognise the CD with the OAKCDROM.SYS or other driver on the floppy. Then you can use FDISK to set for large drives, remove any non-DOS (example, NTFS) partitions on the HD, and install a FAT32 partition on it.

When you reboot again, use the FORMAT command to prepare the new C: partition and install Win98SE by selecting the CDROM, then running SETUP.EXE.