Can't Find CD-ROM after HD Format

[StJoDennis]

Here I am again. I seem to do this every year or so and can't remember what to do. I have formatted the hard drive, have a boot disk, and am ready to install Win95. Unfortunately, I can't find the drive desgnation for the CD-ROM. The drive shows up on the boot display, I have hard drives answering in C: and D:, but can't find the CD-ROM. How can I find it?

[Cricket]

Does that boot disk have the generic CD-ROM drivers on it? From what I can remember, I thought the Win95 boot disk didn't have a generic CD-ROM driver.

You can use a Win98 boot disk or go to Bootdisk.com to get a boot disk with generic CD-ROM driver on it.

Cricket

[StJoDennis]

OK, that was one problem. I downloaded the bootdisk with the CD-ROM drivers. However, I'm still not finding the drive from the DOS prompt. Is there a way to find, or assign the drive designation?

[andyms18a]

try the letter R for the cd drive as most of the bootdisk from
Bootdisk.com use the letter R

[StJoDennis]

I tried using R with no luck.

Does anyone have any new ideas?

At this point, I have an older PC with 2 newly formatted hard drives answering as C: and D:.

Drive C: has the system boot files, with the generic CD-ROM driver, on it.

I have also tried using the boot disk in A:.

When I boot the computer, the system detects the CD-ROM, and the boot screen shows it as Slave 1. From that, I am assuming the system knows the CD-ROM is there.

I have Windows 95 on CD, but can't get the CD-ROM to answer any DOS commands (On startup, the CD-ROM blinks a couple of times, but then goes to sleep).

I am stuck until I can use the CD-ROM to install the operating system. I know I am missing something here. A year or so ago, I had a very similar problem, but can't remember how you solved it.

[andyms18a]

place the win 95 cd in the cd drive then boot with a win98 boot flopy disk chose the option to boot with cdrom support and look at the screan it will say which drive letter your cd drive is if you dont see a drive leter then start at E and work your way to Z so for an example at the A:\ type E:\ and if that dont work try the next letter ie F:\ till the CDrom is found then type setup and hit enter

[edfair]

If you can see the CD driver loading, and acknowledging the existence of the CD you have good communications with it and it is reachable.
The remaining problem is letting DOS know that the device exists and that you want to talk to it. Normal method is to use a line in autoexec.bat calling the MSDOS utility MSCDEX. As in MSCDEX /d:mscd001 or possibly another name , it depends on the driver name assigned during the config.sys execution.

[edfair]

As to assigning the drive letter, that is a switch setting: /f:driveletter, or something close to that in the line calling MSCDEX.

[StJoDennis]

I finally got a chance to try andyms18a's suggestions. I got the 98 bootdisk from bootdisk.com and am wending this as Win 95 is installing. It assigned the CD-ROM to drive letter E: and everything is looking good. The mouse pointer is missing, but I think that is any easy fix once windows finishes the install. Thanks to all for your advice.

[andyms18a]

if you mouse is usb then the first win95 Cd's did not support them but when it has finished and you download all the updates your mouse will work again