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I have just formatted the hard drive of my laptop, but I cannot reinstall Windows 98 SE. The laptop can only use one drive at a time, and it will not boot unless the startup disk is in the drive. If the CD ROM drive is in there, it says "Non-system disk or boot error" (ie, the traditional disk in the drive error). I have selected CD drive as first boot option, but it still wont work. How can I fix this?
Perhaps your copy of win 98se is not bootable? Depending on your cdrom drive, you can create a boot disk that grant you access to your cdrom provided that you have the correct driver(s) for the cdrom. After booting with the floppy, use a change drive to the cdrom and then run setup.
Failing that, you can always remove your hdd, install it in another computer (adapter required), copy the contents of the cdrom using xcopy into a temp directory, restore the drive, and finally boot with the floppy, change to your hdd, and then run setup. Where there is a will there is a way. :)
BTW, if you use format C: /s, the system files will be added to your hard drive.
The problem is, when I load with the floppy, the CD rom drive isn't in, so the drivers dont load. And anyway, I can't hot swap the drives. Isn't there some way I can do this?
I assume you have a bootable floppy disk.
1. Boot from your floppy disk.
2. type "sys c:" or "format c:/s"
3. If your CD drive has an installation disk copy the contents in a directory in the c: drive.
4. If the CD Drive does not have a installation disk then you can download the drivers from the manufacturers website (Obviously, you will have to use a different computer for this)
5. Swap the floppy drive with the CD drive and reboot. The computer should boot from C:
6. Run setup/install from the directory you copied the CD drivers.
7. Your computer should be ready to use the CD drive. If you still have problems then you may have to create the autoexec.bat and config.sys file manually.
Yep, that's what I ended up doing. Took me hours though. I haven't worked in DOS for so long, so I had to relearn the whole system to be able to do this. Thanks for the help.Quote:
you may have to create the autoexec.bat and config.sys file manually.