Dirt Old PC Problem....

[darkeneddays]

Ok,a friend of mine at work did something retarded to his badass Packard Bell 166mhz,32mb RAM,3 gig monster
He apparently thought it could handle RTCW,so he tried installing it.Well during installation it told him he didn't have enough stace to install the game.So he goes and just starts deleting random files out his C: drive.
Well Mr. Brilliant reboots and lo and behold,he gets an error that there is no system disk or something(ie-OS went bye-bye).I go over to help him out and go ahead and format C:.I found his PB boot disc and Master CD-Rom.Plopped it in and got the A: prompt.Tried to switch over to D:....not happening.It says CD-Rom not detected.I go down the alphabet trying to find his CD drive letter and nothing works.
So now holmes can't do anything.I tried doing Win98 boot disc and CD...same result.
I went up into the "setup"(bios) and it clearly shows the CD-Rom being the master on the 2nd IDE cable.In fact when I start the PC up it even says Hard disk installed and CD-Rom installed.Yet both boot discs refuse to accknowledge its exsistence.
I tried installing another cd-rom drive....no luck there either.
His bios does not have the option to boot from CD...only floppy,hard disk,and network.
So anyways,does anyone have any idea how to get this dinosaur to recognize it has a cd-rom drive with a boot disc.
Any help is appreciated

 

[bunker]

The win98 boot disk should work as long as you have CD drivers on the boot disk (mscdex I think)

 

[acidvoodoo]

i had the same problem, my boot disk would not let me see the cd rom. so i went to www.polarfox.com , and download one of the bootdisk files (on the left of the page). naviagte from that and download a disk for whatever OS u wanna install, then save it to your hard drive. double click it, it will ask u to put in a blank disk, do that, wait abit, and u have a bootable floppy, the drive letter will be R: i belive

hope this helps

 

[foQ]

Some of those old packard bells used really weird CD-ROMs with proprietary DOS drivers. Try replacing his old cd-rom with a generic one and trying the setup again. If that doesn't work, put the hard drive in another machine and copy the OS install files to it and you should be ready to go.

 

[Woodie]

BTDT....w/ a Compaq Presario...custom CD-ROM.

solution is CDGOD...I can't remember where I found it, but search for CDGOD55.exe. It creates a bootable Win95 (DOS) diskette, and lets you pick from any one of 40+ CD drivers. Pick one driver, see if it works, if not, you're back to the menu--with no reboots!

PM me if you can't find it.