Old Laptop trying to install Win 95

[taboragr]

Gang,

My name is George. New to the community so bear with me. Have been reading thru everones responses and I'm very impressed with your expertise and your willingness to help others. You guys are good people!!!!

I'm trying to help a buddy fix an old Texas Instruments Extensa 550CD Laptop for his mother in law. (don't laugh, i owe him a favor!)
Anyways, it has an interchangeable slot to switch in either your 3.5" floppy drive or CDROM drive. They still work. When scanning thru the messages showing the computer specs when booting up, it is recognizing the floppy drive but not recognizing the CDROM drive and it comes up with the message "Operating system not found".

Having read your help pages (thanks Gretap!), I have been able to downloaded a startup boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and I also have a Win 95 CD. Using the startup disk, I can bring it to DOS prompt when booting it up. Was going to go thru procedures written up by you all for partitioning and formating a disk but I can't find the C: drive. Says invalid drive specification. Sorta stuck now. Hoping someone can lend a hand.

[jdc2000]

The first thing to check would be to make sure that the BIOS is set up correctly to recognize the hard drive. When you boot the laptop, there should be some BIOS messages that appear on the screen. With any luck, one of those will be some something like 'Press ?? to enter setup', where the ?? is a key or key sequence to use. Press that and check through the BIOS setup to see if the hard drive can be detected by the BIOS. There should be a setting for 'Auto detect' somewhere.

[GretaP]

Hi George,
I am glad to hear that you're pleased with this site :D

In addition to the advice given by jdc2000, if the BIOS does recognize the hard drive yet you're still getting the invalid drive specification error when you try to access C drive, that could be due to a problem with the partition (or lack thereof) on the hard drive. Boot from the startup disk that you created and when you get to the A: prompt, invoke FDISK. When at the FDISK Options Menu, select #4 to Display partition information. Please post back here the results.

[taboragr]

GretaP and JDC2000,

thanks guys for the suggestion. Hey it worked. Went thru the SETUP and noticed the IDE Master field had NONE to it so assigned it some space and then partitioned and formatted the hard drive following your guidance. FDISK command shows the following guys:

Partition - C:1 Status - A Type - Pri DOS Mbytes - 1295 System - UNK Usage - 100%

Now when I go to reinstall windows, I'm using my floppy boot disk to start this off, however, aborts the Windows 95 install and I get an error as follows (be mindful that I have a laptop with only one slot to share the floppy and CDROM drive so I have to swap them out):

Device driver not found. "Banana"
No valid CDROM device driver selected
A:\>

When I swap the floppy drive for the CDROM drive and use the Win 95 CD to try and boot to it up, it says the following:

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and Press any key

I do notice that when I do take out the Win 95 CDROM, it installs the CDROM device but I still get the "Invalid system disk error".

Hope I'm doing this right. Felt good I got it this far with your help guys! If this ever works out, you guys could come over for beers!

Standing by,
George

P.S. If you have a flag, remember to hang out it for Patriot's Day, Sept. 11th.

[GretaP]

Hey, taboragr!
Good to hear that you're getting on the right track with this one!!

Does the boot device order in the laptop's BIOS Setup have an option to boot from CDROM? If so, even though the WIN95 install CD is not bootable, if you have access to a system that has a CD burner, you can create a bootable CD and then copy the startup floppy disk to the bootable CD. Set the first boot device as CDROM and boot from the bootable startup CD. It will be as if you're starting from a floppy boot disk (choose to start WITH CDROM SUPPORT, it boots to an A: prompt and loads CDROM on different drive letter). You'll have to format the C drive first, then copy the WIN95 folder from the install CD to a folder on C drive (call the folder/directory WIN95) and run setup from the WIN95 folder on the C drive.

[taboragr]

GretaP,

There's no CDROM option in the boot sequence only A: and C: drives? Can I do anything else.

Will work on making a bootable CDROM. Does this mean copying the contents of the 3.5" bootdisk unto a CDROM only and using this for Booting? or combining the 3.5" bootdisk files along with the Win95 CDROM files and using this for Booting?

George

[GretaP]

taboragr,
When you downloaded and created the startup boot disk, was it a WIN95 boot disk? Reason I ask is because you're going to have to transfer the system files from the startup disk to C drive in order to make C drive bootable, and you'll need to use the startup disk that is for the SAME VERSION of Windows that you are going to install. Don't worry about making that bootable CDROM, because the laptop doesn't offer the feature to boot from the CDROM drive (I didn't think it would, but it was worth a try to have you find out for certain).

To make C drive bootable, if you haven't yet formatted the C drive, boot from the startup disk (if it's not a WIN95 startup disk, then please download the file to create a WIN95 startup disk) and, at the A: prompt, key in:
format C: /s
<ENTER>
This formats the drive and transfers the system files.
If you have already formatted the drive, and didn't use the /s switch, you can transfer the files by booting from the startup disk and, at the A: prompt, key in:
sys C:
<ENTER>

Now you'll have to download and install the CDROM drivers for DOS. The d/load is available here (http://www.acersupport.com/notebook/html/e550_dl.html#DOSWFWDR). (E570 Windows 3.11 & DOS Drivers). Note that you'll need to key in the serial number of the laptop in order to complete the download. In this support document (http://www.acersupport.com/library/ti_note/9814658.pdf), scroll down to Software configuration "For DOS/WFW3.11 -" as this gives you directions on how to d/load and install the DOS drivers.

Once you have formatted, transferred the system files, and installed the DOS drivers, try to boot the laptop "normally" (without startup disk) with the CD drive in the laptop, and see whether it boots with CDROM support or not. Let me know how it goes or what problems/errors you run into.

[taboragr]

GretaP,

Man your good! Call me George! Thanks for steering me the other way rather than making a bootable DROM. Install the CDROM drivers you requested and "YES" the laptop does now boot from the hard drive with the system files now transferred to it and with the CDROM reader installed.

Feeling okay about this, however, not sure how to talk to CDROM reader from DOS so I could get access to the WIN95 installation files on CD. This is what I'm assuming you want me to do next GretaP?

Standing By,
George

[GretaP]

GretaP,

Man your good! Call me George! Thanks for steering me the other way rather than making a bootable DROM. Install the CDROM drivers you requested and "YES" the laptop does now boot from the hard drive with the system files now transferred to it and with the CDROM reader installed.

Feeling okay about this, however, not sure how to talk to CDROM reader from DOS so I could get access to the WIN95 installation files on CD. This is what I'm assuming you want me to do next GretaP?

Standing By,
George
I aim to please, George, though I'm not always successful at it :)

I didn't want you to waste time making the boot CDROM, since you wouldn't be able to use it to boot the laptop (do file that away for future reference, though, if you end up working on a lappie that has the swappable floppy and CD bays and it CAN boot from CDROM).

Okay, now do this:
Start the laptop with the CDROM drive installed. When you're at the C: prompt, key in:
md windows
<ENTER>
Hit the F3 key (should bring up your previous command) and key in (beside windows):
\cabs
<ENTER>
Now key in:
cd windows\cabs
<ENTER>
At the C:\windows\cabs prompt, put the WIN95 install CD in the drive, and key in:
copy X:\win95
(replace the X that I have written above with the actual drive letter for the CD drive)
<ENTER>
The cab and setup files should now copy to the C:\windows\cabs folder on the hard drive.
When finished, and you're back at the C:\windows\cabs prompt, key in:
setup
<ENTER>

Let me know how it goes!

[taboragr]

GretaP,

Thanks again for the quick response! Dumb question, but how can I find out what my drive letter is for the CDROM reader. When it boots up, I never see it being recognized with a drive letter. Only letter drives I see are as follows: A:3.5" , B: None and C: Hard Drive.

Do I designated it somehow during the BIOS setup?

George

[GretaP]

If you don't see a reference to it during bootup and before you get to the C: prompt (I know that when you boot from the startup disk on a computer that doesn't have the swap bays, the reference to the drive letter, which I've called X, is in the line: Drive X: = Driver MSCD001 unit 0), you can find out by trial and error. When you're at the C: prompt, put the install CD in the CD drive and change to drive letter D. If there is no support for a drive "D", you'll get an error message. If you get a D: prompt, key in:
dir
<ENTER>
You're looking here for directories that would be on the WIN95 install CD, such as win95
I believe a few of the other directories are:
other
drivers
sampler

If D doesn't work, try E: then F: , etc.

When you see those directories (amongst others) listed, then you know that you have the correct drive letter.