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Drive X is using msdos comatibility mode

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by metallica 1 view

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I have this old win 95 machine 133 processor with 32 Mb of ram with an eisa modem-sound card.When it boots i get an error message vxd 005 could not load no DSP board found.When windows finally boots all of my drives including my cd-rom and cd-rw areusing ms-dos compatibility mode.Now niether one of my cd drives show up in my computer.I tried swapping my config.sys and autoexec.bat with clean ones using a generic cd-rom driver,but it did not work.I tried booting to a startup disk but then i cannot see my c: drive when i used fdisk to look at my 2 partitions they are both listed as non dos unk file system.I also tried removing the modem and sound card and reinstalling them since i read that dsp boards involve wave codecs but it did not work.I also tried booting to a startup disk and reinstalling so i could save my files but even the installation cannot see my c: or d: drive.I am eventually going to copy the files i need off the drive and fdisk my partitions and reinstall but it is driving me crazy why this is happening

9 replies

by metallica

i see how this could be a solution but how come when i boot to a startup disk and use fdisk to display my partitions it says they are non dos.And how come when i try to reinstall it does not see the partitions.But yet i can still boot to the os veryslowly.

by grump

My guess is that the Hard Drive is FAT32 and your boot disk of which is possibly 95a which only supports fat16.
There is no simple fix for you problem so you can do one of two things.

In you config.sys file make sure you are loading CD ROM drivers which will work with you cdrom drives. and in the AUTOEXEC.BAT run mscdex.exe to load the DOS extentions for ROM Drives. You should be able to access the cdrom drives in the dos compatibility mode. Simply loading the new rom drivers wouldn't work without runing mscdex.exe
If your system boots up you should be able to copy the files you need to a Floppy.

Second you could edit you system registery.

search the registery and remove the tag " noide " This has put you IDE control in the DOS COMPATIBILITY mode.

Have Fun and keep smiling!

by guruofdos

Possible answers:

1) Is this possibly a Compaq PC? What you have is a nasty example of a proprietary system where the 'BIOS' is simply a bootstrap routine and the actual bios code is stored on a non-dos, or 'hidden' sector on the hard disk. You will need the system setup disks from the manufacturer (often available on their web-site) to access or re-setup the bios.

2) Has the drive been set up using 3rd party partitioning software such as MaxBlast (Maxtor) or EZ-Drive (Western Digital) or OnTrack (Fujitsu/Quantum)? If so, you will need to access the drive using the appropriate bootable disk for that system, or follow a prompt on screen such as 'Press CTRL to boot from floppy' to enable the overlay software to access the drive beforethe OS kicks in.

The modem-sound card combi sounds like an IBM/Miro M-Wave device or an Aztech Labs card...most likely an MWAVE because of the reference to DSP. The drivers are technically for 3.11 but have been messed with to work in W95. www.ibm.com or www.miro.com are good places to start.

by metallica

Ok I went into the registry and deleted the NOIDE entry and rebooted it is finally out of ms-dos compatability mode,thank god!I still have the error message upon booting about no dsp board found Which i figure the sound card modem combo is probably seen better days.how come when i boot to a floppy even using the ctrl key (it is an old acer motherboard)and use fdisk to view my partitins they say non dos unk file system If i press f8 and choose command prompt only and view them with fdisk they say pri dos fat 32.I have booted it with win 95 98 and 98se start up disks and they all do the same thing

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