The increase in the CD-ROM drive letter is something to remember in terms of a Windows 98-generated boot disk, since it creates a RAM drive which takes a letter right after the hard drive partitions. In terms of the Dell Magic Boot Disk, the disk from Al Otero's site, and the others, no drive letter would change on that account.
George, did you change your CD-ROM since builiding any of these disks? Did you add in another hard drive or change the normal drive letter sequence at all? The reason I ask is that if you changed your CD-ROM, the new one may not use the ATAPI CD-ROM drivers normally used on these things. You may need the actual DOS drivers from a supplied disk or downloaded from the manufacturer's site, if so.
If you added in another drive which bumped your normal lettering forward, then that could affect it as well. Just out of curiosity, have you tried making an emergency disk using the Windows utlity in Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs | Startup Disk? I would try that, just to see what Windows says about it. Try it, watch the bootup process, and it will give you the assigned drive letter for the RAM drive and the CD-ROM, if it is able to load a driver for it.
Also, do you get an error message when you watch the system try to load CD-ROM drivers during the bootdisk bootups? Finally, just to be sure, make sure the CD-ROM and the floppy disk drive both work well in Windows, just to eliminate those as possible problems.
Kay and Venture, thanks for the replies. I didn't mention that I am using Win95. I am aware of the drive letter shift when using a Win 98 generated boot disk.
I did not change my CD-ROM or add another hard drive or change any drive letters. Have only added 32MB of Ram to my XPS M200, no other hardware changes. Everything about the computer seems to be working fine including the Mitsumi CD-ROM FX120T !B.
I did make another Startup Disk using Control Panel/Add/Remove/Startup Disk on this W95 system, watched it boot up and did not notice anything unusual---got an A:\> prompt. Of course it would not give me an E: access because it lacks the CD-ROM drivers as we know.
Using my formerly "okay" Boot disks, I did not get any error messages other than "Invalid system disk.
Replace and press any key when ready." This message would appear when I tried to access the "E"
Drive (CD-ROM). Floppy drive works okay also.
First noticed this problem the other day when I was making Boot Disks with CD-ROM support from two other sources.
That's a really odd little error message--I would have expected it to tell you that you had an invalid drive specification, not that you had an invalid system disk.
I am guessing that start to finish, you are running OSR2, is that right? You won't be installing OSR1, then upgrading OSR2? In addition, I am assuming that you did not change your FAT from 16 to 32 somewhere along the way, between the making of the first boot disks, and the making of the new ones? That might result in an invalid system disk error when using the first bunch of boot disks.
I happen to have a working Dell Magic Boot Disk; the CD-ROM drivers are ATAPI. If you'd like to try it, I can zip the file and upload it to webspace so that you can download it, or I can e-mail it to you.
Other than trying a boot disk known to be working, I'm at a real loss here, but perhaps someone else has some ideas. Let me know if you'd like the copy of Dell's boot disk.
Yes, I am running Win95B, OSR2 and have always had FAT 32 so all five of my different Boot Disks were made with no changes along the way and they would all access CD ROM. In addition, I made two new Boot disks with CD support recently from other Technical Forums and neither worked to access the
CD-ROM. That's when I decided to check the others I've had for sometime and which had tested okay.
I'd be happy to try your Magic Disk shipped to me either way. I'm at gfbrown@pacbell.net
Just tried running my previously okay disks again and I need to correct the error message. You are right, the message today is "invalid drive specification". The other message I was getting came from the two new disks I was trying to make from Tech Forums PC911 and Computing.Net.
Venture1
164 Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 03:00
KayH
1.1K Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 03:00
Hi,
The increase in the CD-ROM drive letter is something to remember in terms of a Windows 98-generated boot disk, since it creates a RAM drive which takes a letter right after the hard drive partitions. In terms of the Dell Magic Boot Disk, the disk from Al Otero's site, and the others, no drive letter would change on that account.
George, did you change your CD-ROM since builiding any of these disks? Did you add in another hard drive or change the normal drive letter sequence at all? The reason I ask is that if you changed your CD-ROM, the new one may not use the ATAPI CD-ROM drivers normally used on these things. You may need the actual DOS drivers from a supplied disk or downloaded from the manufacturer's site, if so.
If you added in another drive which bumped your normal lettering forward, then that could affect it as well. Just out of curiosity, have you tried making an emergency disk using the Windows utlity in Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs | Startup Disk? I would try that, just to see what Windows says about it. Try it, watch the bootup process, and it will give you the assigned drive letter for the RAM drive and the CD-ROM, if it is able to load a driver for it.
Also, do you get an error message when you watch the system try to load CD-ROM drivers during the bootdisk bootups? Finally, just to be sure, make sure the CD-ROM and the floppy disk drive both work well in Windows, just to eliminate those as possible problems.
Later,
Kay
gfbrown_e64402
116 Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 16:00
I did not change my CD-ROM or add another hard drive or change any drive letters. Have only added 32MB of Ram to my XPS M200, no other hardware changes. Everything about the computer seems to be working fine including the Mitsumi CD-ROM FX120T !B.
I did make another Startup Disk using Control Panel/Add/Remove/Startup Disk on this W95 system, watched it boot up and did not notice anything unusual---got an A:\> prompt. Of course it would not give me an E: access because it lacks the CD-ROM drivers as we know.
Using my formerly "okay" Boot disks, I did not get any error messages other than "Invalid system disk.
Replace and press any key when ready." This message would appear when I tried to access the "E"
Drive (CD-ROM). Floppy drive works okay also.
First noticed this problem the other day when I was making Boot Disks with CD-ROM support from two other sources.
KayH
1.1K Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 17:00
Hi George,
That's a really odd little error message--I would have expected it to tell you that you had an invalid drive specification, not that you had an invalid system disk.
I am guessing that start to finish, you are running OSR2, is that right? You won't be installing OSR1, then upgrading OSR2? In addition, I am assuming that you did not change your FAT from 16 to 32 somewhere along the way, between the making of the first boot disks, and the making of the new ones? That might result in an invalid system disk error when using the first bunch of boot disks.
I happen to have a working Dell Magic Boot Disk; the CD-ROM drivers are ATAPI. If you'd like to try it, I can zip the file and upload it to webspace so that you can download it, or I can e-mail it to you.
Other than trying a boot disk known to be working, I'm at a real loss here, but perhaps someone else has some ideas. Let me know if you'd like the copy of Dell's boot disk.
Good luck,
Kay
gfbrown_e64402
116 Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 19:00
Yes, I am running Win95B, OSR2 and have always had FAT 32 so all five of my different Boot Disks were made with no changes along the way and they would all access CD ROM. In addition, I made two new Boot disks with CD support recently from other Technical Forums and neither worked to access the
CD-ROM. That's when I decided to check the others I've had for sometime and which had tested okay.
I'd be happy to try your Magic Disk shipped to me either way. I'm at gfbrown@pacbell.net
gfbrown_e64402
116 Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 21:00
Just tried running my previously okay disks again and I need to correct the error message. You are right, the message today is "invalid drive specification". The other message I was getting came from the two new disks I was trying to make from Tech Forums PC911 and Computing.Net.
KayH
1.1K Posts
0
January 20th, 2001 22:00