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Making a CD Rom drive bootable?

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7 replies

by ballyb

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Does anyone know how I can make an older PC's cdrom, bootable? This is the situation:

(133mhz, 64 mb, 1gig scsi HD, floppy and cdrom drives)
Want to fdisk and format it (clean).
I want to load up NT4 (for simple testing, etc):

I have a '98 boot disk; it sees the HD (c:) and the Ramdrive (d:). When I do e: (etc) dir...it doesn't see the cdrom drive. I know there is a way to add the cdrom command to the boot disk, eg. adding mscdex.exe to the autoexec.bat...or something?! But am confused!

Appreciate any help?

7 replies

by mcarrara

I am a bit confused about your question. Do you want to make youe CDROM bootable or do you want to lload CDROM drivers from a boot disk? They are two different subjects.
1. To make CDROM bootable you need to change the boot order or Start up order in your BIOS. Press DEL or whatever to get to your BIOS and change the setting to make the CDROm the first boot device. If you are trying to install Win NT You can put the CD into the drive and boot from that.

2. To load CD drivers from a floppy you do have to add them and make changes to the start up files. I think the easiest method is to make a Windows 98 Startup disk. You do this from the Control Panel>Add/remove programs (If I rember correctly).

by muddyknees

Is that a Win98 Boot Diskette? Just reboot with the disk. You will be asked to select if you want CDROM support. Select with CD ROM support. It will boot with the CD driver loaded. You should then be able to useo your CD drive.

Or u can use the win98 CD and boot with it. Just go to bios and make sure one of your 1st boot device is CDROM.

by mdl3

Ok to make your computer boot from cdrom you have to change the boot sequence in CMOS start your computer when computer starts booting up interrupte it by pressing delete or F2, this will allow you to enter CMOS configuration controls,once your in look for boot sequence and say CDROM first and Floppy second and HDD third, that will make your computer able to boot from a CD.
Now for your computer to see your CDROM in DOS you have to load CDROM support in to memory, now if you don't have a win98bootable with CDROM support you can make one,go to a functional computer running win98 and go to control panel, than go to add/remove progs. go to create a emergency disk, incert a blank disk and that will make you a bootable with CDROM support, boot from it and before contunueing specify "boot with CDROM support" and wait for it to load the drivers,than search for your CDROM it will be the last drive.
Hope it helps!

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