If this is windows95 it cant find the CD on the boot up cause its not there. Win95 bootup disk had essential things missing from it and you have to go in and add them and make a working boot disk to get it to work. Win98 is supposed to have a complete boot up disk. Creating a "Real" Windows 95 Boot Disk
By Bob O'Donnell
Though floppy drives and floppy disks are increasingly falling
out of favor, there are many occasions when a single floppy disk
can make the difference between being able to use your
computer or not.
I’m referring specifically to a boot disk, which is a floppy disk
that allows you to boot, or startup, your computer without
having to access the hard drive. A boot disk contains all the
necessary operating system files your computer needs to get
started. Boot disks can be tremendously important for many
different applications and, frankly, no computer user should be
without one.
For example, if your hard drive fails, or if you have the misfortune
of contracting a computer virus that attacks your hard disk’s
master boot record (as many of them do), or if some of your
important operating system files get accidentally deleted or
otherwise corrupted, a boot floppy will be your savior. (For more
advice on addressing on common boot problems, see the "PC
Startup Troubleshooting Tips" article.)
In addition, if you ever want to reformat your hard disk or
reinstall Windows 95 (or Win98, for that matter) from the CD,
you’ll also need to have a boot disk. (For more on this issue, see
"Starting Over: Repartitioning, Reformatting and Reinstalling.")
Some older DOS games also work better if you boot your
computer from a startup disk.
In recognition of this importance, Microsoft made the process of
creating a basic Windows 95 boot disk very easy. All you have
to do is open the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel. To do
that, click on the Start button, go up to Settings, select Control
Panel from the list of available choices and when the Control
Panel window opens, just double click on Add/Remove
Programs. Once that's open, click on the Startup Disk tab and
click on Create Disk… You’ll be prompted to insert the Windows
95 CD into your CD-ROM drive (in most cases) and to put a
floppy disk into the floppy drive. After a minute or two, you’ll
have a disk that includes all the critical files necessary to start
your computer and "see" your hard disk. The basic boot disk
also includes important disk utilities such as Scandisk.exe,
Fdisk.exe and Format.exe.
Unfortunately, that disk will not be able to "see" your CD-ROM,
which means you won’t be able re-install Windows 95 from a CD,
run a CD-based DOS game or do any of a number of other
possible applications. If you boot with this disk and try to switch
to the CD you’ll get the heart-warming "Invalid Drive
Specification" error message in DOS.
The "simple" answer to this problem is to just install your
CD-ROM driver onto the disk—that's the answer most magazines
and books will give you. The problem is, they don't tell you how
to do that.
(By the way, Microsoft clearly saw the errors of its ways here
because the Windows 98 boot floppy—which you create in the
exact same way as you do under Windows 95—does include a
CD-ROM driver. In fact, it includes both a generic IDE/ATAPI
driver as well as a generic SCSI CD-ROM driver. Even better, a
boot floppy created under Windows 98 will boot a Windows 95
machine without any problems or conflicts at all. Now, why
Microsoft couldn't have done this in the first place is beyond
me....)
Before I get to the specifics of how it's done with Windows 95,
let me give just a bit more background. In order for a CD-ROM
drive or any other device (such as a sound card) to be "visible"
in DOS, you have to tell the operating system that it's there. You
do that through specific pieces of software called device drivers,
or just drivers for short, that "communicate" between your
operating system and these devices (such as the CD-ROM
drive).
There are different types of driver files, but for a boot floppy you
need a "real mode" or 16-bit driver for your CD-ROM drive.
("Real mode" refers to a type of memory allocation system used
by DOS and early Intel processors.)
In order for DOS drivers to work on a boot floppy you need to
both have copies of the appropriate drivers on the disk and put
references to those driver files in some of the operating system
startup files also found on the startup floppy. Without those
references, the operating system doesn't know the drivers are
there and won't be able to load them. And if it doesn't load them,
well, we're back where we started—an "invisible" CD drive.
In the case of a CD-ROM, you need two driver files, one that's
specific to your machine and one that's included with the
standard Windows 95 installation. The file that's specific to your
machine is the "real mode" or DOS driver I referred to earlier. The
startup files you need to adjust are Config.sys, which is included
on the standard boot floppy, and Autoexec.bat, which is not.
If you also wanted to add a sound card driver to this floppy in
order to play games, you would copy over an additional file and
then make additional changes to the existing Config.sys startup
file.
For the purposes of this article, I’m only going to describe how
to install the CD-ROM driver for an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drive,
which is what most computers have. The same basic principles
apply to SCSI CD-ROMs and sound cards, although you may
need to make some additional alterations to the startup files to
get them to work properly. Check the documentation that came
with your sound card or with your PC for more details.
OK. Now it's time to describe how to create your CD-ROM
driver-equipped boot disk. As I explained, the first thing to do is
to find a copy of the real-mode driver for your CD-ROM. Note
that this is different from the 32-bit Windows 95 driver that your
CD-ROM uses while running under Windows 95. Most 32-bit
drivers are called virtual device drivers and have the file
extension .vxd, whereas many real-mode CD-ROM drivers end
with a .sys at the end of their file name. For example, the
real-mode CD-ROM driver for the Dell Computer I’m currently
using, which has an NEC CD-ROM, is called nec_bm.sys.
On some computer systems you can find the real-mode driver on
a separate floppy that came with the computer (or with the
CD-ROM drive itself, if you added it separately), but in many
cases, particularly with newer computers, you’ll find that you
don’t have it. In that case, you should first check the computer
manufacturer’s web site, then call them if you can’t find it there.
If you know who made the CD-ROM drive mechanism used in
your computer, then you can use the same techniques with that
company.
If you don’t know who made the drive you can often find out by
typing in the FCC ID, which has to be on a sticker somewhere on
the drive, into a special FCC database (linked here) that tracks all
that information. Every company that sells a computer product
has to have a unique ID, so by typing that ID in, you can find
out the name of the company that sold the drive, as well as an
address and a phone number.
Once you’ve found out who made the drive, another possible
source for drivers is one of the many driver sites here on the
Web, such as The Driver Zone, WinDrivers.Com, WinFiles, or
Frank Condron's World o' Windows.
After you copy the CD-ROM driver over to the startup floppy,
you’ll also need to copy over a Microsoft-supplied system-level
CD-ROM driver called MSCDEX.EXE. You should find a copy of
it in your Windows/Command folder on your C: drive. If it's not
there, you'll definitely find it on the Windows 95 CD that came
with your computer.
The next step is to open the Config.sys file and add one line to it.
To do that, you'll use the DOS Edit application that’s installed on
the boot floppy as part of the standard Create System Disk
routine.
To get to the application, open an MS-DOS window by going to
the Start menu and selecting MS-DOS Prompt from the Programs
menu item. After the window opens, switch to your A: drive by
typing A: and then Enter.
Once you get an A:\> prompt, type in "edit" (without the
quotation marks) and hit Enter and you’ll be presented with a
basic text editing program. Open the Config.sys file on your A:
drive.
By the way, make sure you’re not editing the Config.sys file on
your C: drive or you could have big problems. You should be
able to easily tell because the basic Config.sys on the standard
boot floppy has only one line in it and it refers to Himem.sys.
Put your cursor underneath that line and type in:
Device=A:\<name of your driver> /D:MSCD001
Don’t actually type <name of your driver>—that needs to be
replaced with the exact spelling of the driver file you previously
copied onto the floppy disk. So again, in my case it was:
Device=A:\nec_bm.sys /D:MSCD001
Save the Config.sys file and close it.
The next step is to create a simple Autoexec.bat file on the
floppy. While you’re still in the Edit application, go to the File
Menu and select New... Then type in the following line:
MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001
When you're done with that, go up to the File menu, select the
Save As… command and save the file as Autoexec.bat
(capitalization doesn’t matter) on the A: drive. Exit the Edit
program and then close the MS-DOS window by clicking on the
X in the upper right hand corner.
That’s it.
Now you need to try it out. To do that, insert the boot floppy
(you did put a new label on it, didn’t you?) into the floppy drive
and restart the machine.
After the normal BIOS messages you should see some startup
messages about MSCDEX and a few other things. Once you get
the A:\> prompt, try switching over to the CD-ROM drive to
make sure the driver worked by typing in D: (or whatever letter
your CD drive is assigned to) and hitting return (make sure you
have a CD-ROM disc of some sort in the drive—it doesn’t matter
what).
If you get the D:\> prompt, try typing a DIR (or directory)
command to make sure you can see the contents of the drive.
You should see a list of all the files and directories on the root
level of the CD you have in the drive. If so, you’ve successfully
created a bootable floppy disk with a CD-ROM driver for your
system. Congratulations!
If not, well, double check your typing and try again. You’ll get it
eventually…..
------------------
S. Clark
Clark Signs (retired)
Compton, Arkansas
sasc@alltel.net
http://www.fortunecity.com/business/notebook/1172/
http://members.xoom.com/sclark/
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