Help with PCMCIA Cdrom booting, Ill give you a dollar if you fix this.

[jblondi]

Hey guys and gals. I have an old Acer Extensa laptop that im trying to get running again. The internal CDrom is dead. I have an external PCMCIA laptop that im trying to get to boot off to install windows. Anyone know of any place I can get a win98 bootdisk that will recognize that as a cd drive for install. Thanks.

 

[TunaBoo]

If your Bios does not support boot to CD-Rom it will not work.

However, you can copy a win98 start up floppy to your C: drive, and have it auto boot and load CD Drivers.

$1 plz.

Oh its a PCMICA CD-Drive. Dam. Umm, cant you boot off it tho with a floppy disk? I mean PCMCIA isnt funky like USB, it should have some native support in DOS, no?

 

[sohcrates]

perhaps this is the answer you've been looking for?

"Smart BootManager supports booting from almost all kinds of IDE ATAPI CD-ROMs, including PCMCIA CD-ROMs"

 

[Pederv]

You'll need the dos drivers for the PCMCIA cdrom you're trying to use. And a card services driver, ATASMGR.SYS or ATAS365.SYS are used by Panasonic. I'd try the manufacturer of the cdrom to see if they have the drivers available. Some manufacturers provide an image of a bootable floppy, some you have to make the floppy yourself.

 

[jblondi]

Yeah, I kinda have an idea of how to go about doing this, like posted earlier, I need the dos drivers and some sort of help with that. Im really kinda a rookie with this stuff. I have the driver disk that came with the cd rom, and my computer at this point it completely formated, no dos. Any other suggestions would be great.

 

[sohcrates]

what's wrong with my above smart bootmanager idea?

"If you have a laptop with a special PCMCIA CD-ROM which has no support for booting in the BIOS, Smart BootManager can help you boot from it"

you don't like this idea?

 

[Doggiedog]

I had a problem like that just last week.

I don't know if it'll apply to you but this is what I did.

I borrowed a PCMCIA Ethernet card from a friend, installed the drivers (about 800K) from floppy and hooked it up to my LAN. Once on the LAN, I just shared the CD-ROM of my PC and copied all the 98 files onto a second partition on my laptop HDD and installed from there.

 

[jblondi]

sohcrates I like your idea, but when the install of windows tries to reboot the machine, will it recognize the pcmcia drive when the machine fires up again?

 

[sohcrates]

umm..i'm not sure i understand your question. could you rephrase it?

 

[jblondi]

I guess what I need is a windows 98 start up disk that knows that im installing from a pcmcia cdrom. Either that, or some way to get the cdrom to read in dos so I can copy all the files to the hard disk.