how do I get CD drive to work

[mubarod]

Installed a used 10 GB Western Digital drive in older IBM Aptiva, when I started machine up it tried to start Win2000 but ended up with blue screen saying "unbootable" something or other. Went to BIOS startup and changed configuration to boot from CD but no luck. In despair I found an old WEstern Digital startup disk, ran that along with an old WIN 98 boot disk and reformatted the drive and now have C prompt on empty hard drive. Have a Philips CD-RW drive, even have original CD from drive but only recognize A and C prompts now. Only file on root of drive is COMMAND.COM. Want to install WIn2000 from CD. How to I even get CD to work to install Win? Help!

[jdc2000]

You can download the files to create a Windows 98 boot diskette from http://www.bootdisk.com Once downloaded, run the program to create the Win98 boot diskette. Then you can boot using that diskette and you will be able to access the CD-ROM drive in DOS mode.

[Key]

****Edit by moderator
Please only respond to thread here if you can give solid advice instead of half witted criticism... I have edited all three of your post here at CTH. I hope you will learn to quit giving advise that doesn't have anything to do with the problem, and to quit advising people to Read. They come here for help, not BS. Thank you.

Edited by Dodge.****

[mubarod]

I downloaded a Win98 boot disk file, executed it which created a floppy boot disk. So far so good. I started the machine, went to BIOS, changed startup options to use floppy first and then restarted the machine. It gave me a Win98 startup screen with option 1 being starting with CD-ROM enabled. I selected that, got to a C prompt, changed to D which was a RAMdisk (bunch of DOS files like config.sys, etc.) and changed to E: which worked but when I did a "DIR" it gave me an error message "CDR001" saying Not ready reading Drive re. I had a Win2000 Pro CD in the drive. Pulled the CD and tried a WIN98Se CD, drive seemed to want to start to spin but never got up to speed and same error message. Put the WIN2000 Cd in and it started spinning and I did a DIR and got the directory of the CD so I looked for setup.exe, saw it, typed in setup and hit enter. GOt an error that said couldn't do this from DOS. Put the WIN98 disk in and got the same CDR001 error message. ANy suggestions on what to do to get Windows loaded? COuld my CR drive be intermittently bad? Why did the WIN2000 disc not allow me to install from DOS? I'm at a loss here, appreciate the help so far.

[tetonbob]

Win2000 is a bootable CD. If it is not auto starting, I'd suspect your CD drive.

Setup is a command used by Win2k in Windows. The command in DOS is WINNT.EXE. The winnt.exe program is used to peform a clean ("full") install of Windows 2000 from an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x environment. This can be an existing installation of MS-DOS/Windows 3.x or a boot disk. You cannot upgrade an existing version of Windows to Windows 2000 with winnt.exe.

You might try winnt.exe from an E prompt.

[smurfy]

What bob said.

:)


Moving this to Win2000 forum.