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cd drive don't work after formatting hard drive

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by tbirdtom57

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I formatted my hard drive on my old computer making a boot disk first as directed. After formatting it will not recognize the cd drive so that I can reinstall my Windows 98se. Any ideas how I can make the cd drive work???

4 replies

by thechas

A raw formatted drive has no device drivers and thus cannot recognize any hardware.

You need to boot from either your Windows 98 CD, or from a W98 startup disk.

The startup disk loads some universal CD drivers so that you can access the installation files on the CD.

You can create a W98 startup disk from any working W98 system. There is a tab in add/remove programs.

Or, you can download a startup disk image from sources such as www.bootdisk.com and www.madboot.com

Chas

by devlin_x

Have you checked your system BIOS to see if your system can boot from the CD drive. It may just be disabled.

If it's an old enough system that it can not be set to boot from CD drive. Then you will have to do what the other poster suggested and create a 98 boot floppy disk from a working Win 98 system.......

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