Hi.. I have an old compaq, and i would like to know how to boot Dos from the c: drive....?

( I had a problem trying to get my cdrom
driver to reconize my cdrom..?
I reconfigured my .sys/.bat files so that
it reconized the driver but could not
find the drive it self, because the floppy
drive was in it's place of the cd. )

So my guess is that if i could boot dos
from my hard disk (c:), That would free
the expasion bay for my cdrom...
Where by...? alowing the cdrom driver to
reconize the cdrom so I can reinstall
windows.....

Could anyone tell me how to boot dos from
my hard disk....?

The floppy drive or drives (if you have 2) are on their own interface cable. These will be drive A: and then B:

For the IDE devices there are 1 or 2 interface cables, supporting upto 4 devices:-
Primary - master C: slave ?:
Secondary - master /: slave ?:

C: is your hdd and the pc should boot from it if there is an o/s installed

?: next device will be D: and so on depending how they are connected.

If the bios in your your pc does *not* support a cd rom drive then you have to load a driver in config.sys and refer to it in autoexec.bat using mscdex.
Part of the line for this is the drive letter.

If the bios *does* support a cd, make sure the cd is enabled in the bios settings.

You may have to do this in more than one place in the bios.

Possibly your problem is caused in that you may have connected the cd device as drive C:, which is incorrect.

Advise how you get on.

Good Luck - Keep us posted.

Check my #1 here and the link to Mesich's site:

http://computing.net/windows95/wwwb...

If you have a specific driver supplied by compaq for the cdrom you should probably use it in place of oakcdrom.sys.

If you have a proper Windows CD, then you do not need to load any drivers as it will boot from the CD and install directly.
If you boot to your C drive, Windows will probably not install as it(95,98 etc) requires an empty drive.
For 2000 and XP, it does not matter if the C drive is already bootable as you are given the opportunity to dual boot or remove the existing system during install.

Response #2 from DAVE (of course) is the way to go. It's not that complicated to setup one of those swappable systems (once you know how)

Mike is (as usual) apparently answering some other post, and 'brander' has decided to ramble on about... well, nothing relevant or accurate

oy vey

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!'... till you can find a rock

Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal

Also this question should be in the W95 Forum because if you had gone there and used the search function you would of found the answer in seconds.......but it is nice to read irrelevent responses.

Mike Newcomb the POSTER has a Laptop

"
The floppy drive or drives (if you have 2) are on their own interface cable. These will be drive A: and then B:
For the IDE devices there are 1 or 2 interface cables, supporting upto 4 devices:-
Primary - master C: slave ?:
Secondary - master /: slave ?:
"

I have looked on my laptop and these cables are not present ? Is there something wrong with my laptop ??

Jboy - Kindly Note!

Dear Dosser - I responded advising the steps of how I personally would tackle the problem for a conventional pc.

I have reread the post, but unless my eyesight is even worse than I thought, I cannot see where it says this is a problem with a laptop.

Good Luck - Keep us posted.

MN this is telling.....

"find the drive it self, because the floppy
drive was in it's place of the cd."

Thanks Dosser.

Now, where did I leave my white stick?

Yeah, no specific mention was made that it's a laptop, but the poster said the cdrom drivers on the bootdisk couldn't find the cdrom because the floppy drive was 'in its place'. Then later he said if he could boot from the hard drive then he could have the cdrom in the expansion bay.

There's been a few recent threads where the poster neglected to mention it was a swappable drive situation. So I think with some of us there's some reading between the lines to pick up on that. I guess it's possible he's got a desktop with limited bays but even then the solution would be the same.

Still in the wrong forum whatever....

Well its possible it could have been a very small form factor HP/Compaq system with a swappable multibay CD/DVD drive and floppy drive, I have one of those at work that i play around with I have even installed Vista on it as an experiment.

To boot dos from your hard drive you will need first to install Dos to the hard drive . . . . . . . . . . . once installed install the cd rom driver, shut down, swap the floppy for the cd, reboot and it should now find your cd drive

Woof

Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

If you just want a bootable drive to install anpother os off a non bootable cd then you can just use the sys command

boot from floppy, type sys c:

after the system files have been transferred message your c drive should be bootable

Woof

Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.