Trying to help a friend w/ his puter.
After formating the hard drive (which had a corrupted Win XP Pro on it before) as he had requested, I tried install Win XP again from the CD but although the BIOS detected the CDROM drive, Windows said something like "no files found on drive".
I booted the puter from an old Win ME boot diskette. It's supposed to be ok for this sort of thing. The BIOS was set up to boot first from floppy, then from CD, then from HD 0.
According to friend, The CD drive worked OK just before and the Win XP CD is accessible via another puter. So I reckon both the drive and the CD are ok.
I reckon it's just a matter of editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to add the
proper mscdex.exe commands - as did in old days - to recognize the CDROM drive during a DOS boot. I don't have the exact cmnds in my head, so tried look up some old boot files on my old comp.
Before I did that, I thought I'd put my friend's CD drive in my own comp to check it and make sure it was ok. As luck would have it, this blew my own comp (tho'
probably it was just some weird coincidence).
I got a long startup beep from the Phoenix BIOS and nothing on screen.
From what I found on Phoenix website, their BIOS doesn't put out any
single long beeps. Reseated mem board. Processor didn't seem to be overheating; so don't know what went wrong yet.
In any case, never mind that; want to concentrate on friend's puter first.
Question: How to modify autoexec and config to access the CDROM drive
after a DOS diskette boot?
Win support does have several similar old boot-disk downloads (2001 thru 2004) available for XP. These are used to create 6 diskettes, just for the purpose of loading the right files to make the CDROM accessible and bootable so Win XP can be installed from it.
6 diskettes! My God! Seems a bit overkill.
Never mind the 'bootable'; I'd just like to make that drive 'accessible' first. There
were just the 2 mscdex commands required before (in autoexec and config) to load the cdrom driver and make the device accessible - which is all that should be necessary. I note that my old Win ME DOS boot disk does have mscdex.exe on it.
It also has '0' bytes left on disk; which means I have to take off one of
the less useful files (like mem.exe) in order to be able to edit autoexec.bat
and config.sys.
Am I on the right track here, or not? And can anybody help w/ those 2 commands?
Really appreciate,
Jed...
