In over my head... again...

Well to start off i had purchased a used dell latitude CPi R. It has 400 mhz processor, a 6 GB hard drive, and 190 mb or ram. When i got it, it had XP professional installed on it and for the first week it ran without issues. Then the infamous AGP440.sys issue kicked in and from there whenever i tried booting up, i'd get a blue screen that'd flash for a second and then it'd reboot by itself. I did research on this and i thought that the OS was the problem. Unfortunately i didn't have a restore disk and i kinda realized that XP wasn't the best operating system for it (that and the XP on there couldn't be saved without a restore disk) so i decided to pull out a windows 98 startup FLOPPY disk to run dos and run FDISK to wipe the drive. I reestablished a partition so i could be ready to install Windows 98 SE. Now here's the problem. I have no CD drive on that laptop except one PCMCIA external drive (I/O Magic) and one CD drive that plugs into the printer port. (backpack bantam). And none of them will boot up. my bet is because of my rash decision i deleted the necessary device drivers needed to run those ports and possibly the hardware that plugs into those ports...

So now that you know the situation, any thoughts???

 

See what your Bios supports booting from first, and then check your Bios settings.

You are on the right track though, Windows 98SE or even 2000 would be far better on dated hardware.

 

... You might try running a copy of Ultimate Boot disk, and seeing if you can access your CD drives using it.

 

1. I'll give the ultimate boot disk a go there's nothing to really lose at this point. (NOTE) I tried using this but it just said NTLDR is missing: Press any key to restart...

2. My bios were configured to run the plug in devices first and i even changed the startup from a fast startup to a thorough startup. I figured the time would be needed to try and read the devices. however these devices just aren't playing along...

 

ok guys i've tried the ultimate boot disk and as said prior NTLDR is missing.... not sure about whats up with that but i think i was better off with the regular start up floppy to at least get to dos....

I've tried all sorts of changes to my BIOs however the issue still remains the PCMCIA slot will power my external CD drive, also the printer port will still not read/recognize my second external CD drive and that one has adapter power... hmmmmmmm what are the options from here???

 

UPDATE: I have finally gotten an external cd drive to work and the device driver i got installed. By the way it wasn't the PCMCIA cd drive but one that used the printer port. also the hard drive is reformatted and its ready for a windows 98 SE os to be installed. However when my victory was brought about i ran into another problem.

the CD drive is recognized and read after the boot into the dos i got onto the hard drive and if i use a startup disk to boot windows 98 to try and install, it won't read the cd drive for some reason and once again i'm stuck.. So where do i go from here???

 

Try, Format C:/S. That'll give you a dos to work with on the hard drive.

If that doesn't work, try setting the computer to boot from the CD drive first, instead of the hard drive. Might not work because the drive is external, but worth a try.

 

While you have the computer booted and recognizing the CD drive, you could copy the CD to your hard drive and install from there.

 

i did format c:/s and thats how i got that dos. I'm already a step ahead of you. how do i copy a cd onto my hard drive with nothing but dos??? I didn't realize that could be done

well back to research

 

copy d:\*.* c:\

Where d: is the CD Rom drive and C: is the hard drive. Should be easy... you may want to create a folder under c:. That's a simple mkdir command.

mkdir c:\setup for example, will do the trick. Then, you can switch to that directory and run setup.

 

will it matter if the file is an ISO file? If i move that file will it boot up automatically?

 

An ISO file when burnt on a CD translates into the CD's contents. You should be able to copy the normal files. I wouldn't expect you actually have an ISO on the CD anymore, but rather the files that the ISO contained. You can check by exploring the CD on another computer.

 

so when i move this iso file it will change into the files the iso contained.... maybe i f***ed up with burning the file as a bootable iso.... hmmmmm

 

Yes, it will matter!! If your computer isn't functioning at present, then find a friend that has one that is and use a program such as Nero to burn the ISO file to a CD with. The ISO file is an image file of your CD and isn't natively recognized by Windows or DOS as anything other than a file.

Please pardon, as I was late posting, and Mada_Milty already had. The ISO file by itself will be of no use to you until it is burned to a CD using a burning program.

What operating system are you trying to install?

 

so the translation is i need to extract the contents of the ISO file, then burn it??

 

Did you burn the ISO file to CD already? If so, you should not have an ISO file anymore. Instead, you should have a windows setup disc containing folders and files (one of which should be setup!) While there are programs you can use to edit the contents, it would be easier in your situation to simply burn it onto disc. No extraction necessary.

 

i burned it as a bootable ISO cd using Nero.

 

The you shouldn't have a problem. As I mentioned, I'd expect that if you were to explore this CD on another computer, you wouldn't find an ISO at all. You should be good to go, sir!

 

i opened the cd on the laptop i'm using to post on and i open it it says iso image file

 

Oh! Okay, well this is of little use to us. I would burn that file directly onto another disc. With Nero, it would be a data disc, and you would just add the ISO file to the project, and burn.

 

would extracting the files from the iso image first work as well??? i'm trying to find the safest route that will work

 

Yes, you can download a 3rd party application that will allow you to manipulate the file in such a way. The safest and easiest route, though would be to just burn the file as I described. This really eliminates a whole step (and improves the margins of error!), as you would have to find an app that works, extract the files, burn them onto CD, and then copy them to the laptop.

 

Alrighty i've made the cd and i have it ready to move however i've discovered a new issue. I think that the cd drive that i'm using is locking up... its a backpack bantam model 181100... i have the device driver for it and i've tried to configure bios to work with it by changing it to ECP on the Parallel mode. are there any other options and possibliities to explore