Win95 reload but no drivers for new CD-ROM drive

[DentOrange]

I am using a DELL Dimension XPS D300 machine with Windows 95 from 1997. I need to reload Windows 95. The problem is that I have replaced the broken original Toshiba CD-ROM drive with a Yamaha CRW2000E. In order to use the WIN95 CD-ROM, I will need to have DOS drivers for this device. The existing boot disk's Toshiba driver hangs when I use it. Yamaha has closed up shop for CD-ROM drives and I can find no drivers for it anywhere on the web, except for newer versions of Windows.

Since it looks like I can't do the reload from the CD-ROM drive, I've copied the contents of the WIN95 CD-ROM to one of my SCSI hard drives, which *is* recognized after booting with the DOS boot disk. But it looks like I would have to create new .INF files that ignore the CD-ROM drive, and I don't know if the operation could proceed from a SCSI hard drive, in any case.

I would welcome any suggestions on how to proceed here. Thanks.

[glc]

Here is what I would do. With the bootdisk, partition and format your IDE drive. Create a directory on it, I'd suggest \win95. Using the DOS copy command, copy the contents of the \win9x directory on the SCSI drive to this directory. No need to copy the subdirectories, just all the files.

Assuming the SCSI drive is seen as drive D, and you copied the CD to its root:

c:\
md win95
copy d:\win9x\*.* c:\win95

Then remove the SCSI drive and reboot with the boot disk -

c:\
cd win95
setup

[DentOrange]

Thanks for the quick reply. Your suggestion sounds quite straightforward. [Just for the record, my IDE hard disk contains drives c: - f:, and the SCSI contains drives g: - k:, the zip is l:, the NEC CD-ROM carousel is m: - s:, and the internal CD-ROM drive is t:. In addition the Paragon CD-ROM emulator currently is using pseudo-CD-ROM drives u: and v:.]

So I would would reformat C: and use your instructions, while modifying the boot disk to not run anything at all. But I'm not sure what you mean by "remove the SCSI drive." Do you expect that having the SCSI drive connected would cause a problem?

I think I will, in addition to doing another full backup of the hard drive to tape, make a complete copy of C: to another SCSI drive. It seems to me that, if there were some problem and I wanted to go back to where I am now, I could just boot off the floppy, reformat C:/S, and then XCOPY everything back to C:, including the hidden files, and expect that a reboot would put me back to where I am now. Do you concur?

One again, thank you for your very helpful advice.

[glc]

I would use the freeware XXCOPY with the /clone switch. Xcopy doesn't support long file names and you can't use xcopy32 in the dos environment.

With all those partitions, you made something simple into something more involved. I simply suggested removing the SCSI drive so you wouldn't install Windows onto the wrong drive inadvertantly, but it sounds like you know what you are doing.

[DentOrange]

I would use the freeware XXCOPY with the /clone switch. Xcopy doesn't support long file names and you can't use xcopy32 in the dos environment.

Thank you for the reference to XXCOPY. It seems to be exactly what I need, except that it must run in a DOS box under Windows. So I wouldn't be able to use it in Real mode to copy the backup of C: onto C: again, if something went wrong.

With all those partitions, you made something simple into something more involved. I simply suggested removing the SCSI drive so you wouldn't install Windows onto the wrong drive inadvertantly, but it sounds like you know what you are doing.

I date from the days of WIN3.1, DOS, and before. My knowledge of WIN95 is very uneven, but I'm learning more all the time. I'm very grateful for your advice and for the existence of this website. Life would be very difficult without such resources.

[glc]

If you need real mode, you can use a drive cloning or imaging app to clone or image partition to partition - the freebies from the hard drive manufacturers may not support scsi drives, but something like Ghost or Drive Image should if you put the scsi drivers on the bootdisk. With Win95 you don't need the latest version of any of them so it should be very inexpensive if you have to buy it.