Tech support time!

[Muadi]

Have a laptop, OS needs to be installed.

It has a replacable drive bay, holding either a floppy or a cdrom.

I can boot to the floppy just fine, but, when you select 'Start with cd-rom support', it tries to install the oakwood drivers.. but, since the cdrom drive is not installed, I get a message saying 'no cdrom drive found' and it aborts the install.

I have used Nero, to make a bootable cdrom, and put the WIN98 boot files on it. No good.

I can't boot directly to the cdrom with a normal WIN98 install disk, because the drive 'does not exist'

What is the solution?

I know if an Alb worked on it, it would be fine.. however, being a Hib, .... well.....the world is against us at all times... this just another example :)

[Sparky]

Have a laptop, OS needs to be installed.

It has a replacable drive bay, holding either a floppy or a cdrom.

I can boot to the floppy just fine, but, when you select 'Start with cd-rom support', it tries to install the oakwood drivers.. but, since the cdrom drive is not installed, I get a message saying 'no cdrom drive found' and it aborts the install.

I have used Nero, to make a bootable cdrom, and put the WIN98 boot files on it. No good.

I can't boot directly to the cdrom with a normal WIN98 install disk, because the drive 'does not exist'

What is the solution?

I know if an Alb worked on it, it would be fine.. however, being a Hib, .... well.....the world is against us at all times... this just another example :)

Do you have an actual copy of win98 that is on a bootable cd? that should work. How old is the laptop?

[Rooster]

Yeah, afaik, you can't just drop the files on a CD (even though you're making a bootable CD in NERO).

You have to actually have a bootable CD (ie, it boots in another machine).

If the BIOS sees the CDrom drive when it's in.. and it's not like an old 486.. or 386.. then it should boot to a bootable CD just fine.

Sounds like you don't have a real bootable CD (like Sparky said).

[Figtoria]

/em agrees with what Sparky and Roo said about bootable CDs.


It may also be that your CMOS is not set to attempt to boot from the CD-ROM.

It's also possible that your CD ROM drive has crapped out, but I'd say (especially if it was working only an o/s load ago) that's the least likely possiblity.


Both Nero and Easy CD Creator will make you a bootable Win98 CD even if you don't have the "real" cd.

[Rooster]

Also, make sure the CD-ROM is booting before the HDD.

I've seen, in many cases, that once it fails to boot to the HDD, it won't go any further. :eh:

[fianu]

umm i know this is a while after the original post, but i wanna input my 2 cents anyways :). If the laptop is a toshiba....it uses a different driver then oakcdrom.sys which windows 98 loads by default. Went through hell with a friend who had the same issue. Eventually had to manually edit the config.sys file to replace the reference to oakcdrom.sys with the toshiba file.. forget the actual file name. It worked like a charm after that :)