I cannot get my boot disk to load any drivers of any sort. I cant figure out how to work msdex or the autoexec or config. I have a sony vaio and a sony external cdrom and i cannot read my cd to install. I have got the duse.exe file and some others but when it installs it says that it cannot find driver so it cancelles the installation. And when i run an install program to try and put a driver on there it wants me to put in windows startup disk 2 where the hell is that at and why the hell doesnt dos support external usb yet this sucks ass.

I've never used an external cdrom but in general, and assuming USB is enabled in cmos and everything is connected and powered properly: The dos driver is loaded in config.sys. Mscdex is loaded in autoexec.bat. If the driver doesn't load, either because it's not there or it can't find the cdrom, then mscdex doesn't load either. A dos driver will have a .sys extension. As I recall the windows drivers for external drives have a different extension. The installation disk you're using needs to supply the dos driver and not the windows driver. If you can locate the actual driver, editing it into config.sys isn't too difficult. Only one driver is needed for a standard IDE internal cdrom. It could be that an external setup will need more than one. I wonder, do the instructions include an option for a manual setup?

I have a simlar problem: I can't get my Sony Vaio laptop to boot from my USB CDROM drive. I tried duse.exe as well but that failed. Any help on how I can get my latop to recognize my USB CDROM would be appreciated. Even when I configure the BIOS to boot from CDROM it doesn't seem to recognize the USB CDROM. Thanks!