Drives not recognised in DOS

[Maximilian]

Ive been trying to flash my BIOS so that my mobo will support cool & quiet. The instructions told me "DO NOT FLASH FROM A FLOPPY!!!!" (which didnt work anyways) So they said to put the bios on C: which is fine, but when i reboot and use the win ME startup disk i type "C:" into the prompt and it tells me "invalid drive specification" same with drive D:. I actually went through the whole alphabet and it didnt find any drives, only accissible thing is the A: drive. How can i make it find my other two hdd's?

 

[Nohr]

Your hard drives are probably NTFS formatted which means a DOS/Win9x/ME boot floppy won't recognize it. I believe there's WinXP startup floppy disk set you can get that'll work.

 

[Maximilian]

Thats it! thats the one, they are NTFS. Where can i find the WinXP floppy? I found one on the microsoft site thats 6 floppys big and allows access to the cd-rom but ykno i need access to the hdd's not the cd.

 

[ty1er]

what motherboard are you running/trying to update?

 

[onza]

www.bootdisk.com might have something there.. havent checked on xp stuff

 

[Snapster]

Flash from a CD ? I love my Asus for that as I don't even need a bootdisk, never need a floppy again.

 

[igowerf]

It said not to flash from a floppy? Did it give any reason why?

 

[Maximilian]

The motherboards an MSI 6741. Small thing with 2 ram slots and less PCI slots than other boards. Well no it didnt really give a reason not to use a floppy, main reason prolly is cuz it dont work i tried it.

Oh also i dont have any cd's. Spose i could go buy some but ykno, im lazy heh. I d/led the 6 disk thing from the microsoft site n ima give dat a try.

 

[Maximilian]

Ok that didnt really work it just gave me options to reinstall windows etc, never gave me access to my hard drive. I found NTFSDOS, a program that worked and recognised my drives, after me installing it and making boot disks it THEN tells me that its a trial version and the full retail version will cost £££. Also it can only ready files from the hdd, not write to it or anything, i tried to acces the bios upgrade as its in a folder called "test" but it didnt work, kept giving me "bad command or file name" Times like these really make you appreciate a GUI. Any more ideas people?

 

[lansalot]

Flash it from a floppy.

Don't use NTFSDOS, that will probably take up enough memory to stop the bios flash prog loading.

There's nothing wrong with flashing from a floppy. However, the one reason I can think of is that there might be a read error on the bios file halfway through or something.

So, once you're booted up of the floppy, to a test read of all the files to make sure they can be read by doing:

copy *.* nul

That will copy them to the null device and you'll be able to see all files readable fine.

Go to it, come back with flashed bios and big smile