Hi,

I recently formatted the my harddrive to reinstall windows 98 se. When I start up using the window 98 startup disk, the cd-rom player is not recognised though (it's not the most usual model i guess, a pioneer dr-us124x).

I downloaded the driver, and tried to install it, but that doesn't seem to work properly, because starting up with the startup disk creates a virtual partition. That way, if I install the driver and have to restart to complete installation, the time after restart it still won't boot from harddisk and I have to use the startup disk again. Does anybody know a way to install the driver? Do I have to change the files on the startup disk or something maybe (autoexec.bat and config.sys or something)?

A big thanks in advance,

Remco

Hi, Remco. I think you hit the nail on the head when you realized that the CD-ROM is an unusual one. Nothing wrong with the drive, just that Windows doesn't have a substitute driver for it. If you know someone with a more plain vanilla brand that you can borrow for awhile, see if you can try it, just long enough to get through the reinstall. After that, you can out your drive back in and install the Pioneer drivers. Good luck.

hi REMCO -
try this...
reboot and go into your Bios Setup...
change boot sequence from "C,CDROM,A" to
"CDROM,C,A" & also turn off any virus detector in the Bios...

tofu madness

You will have to edit the config.sys on
your startup disk to include your driver and
copy your driver to the floppy.

The startup disk creates a ram-drive (your
virtual drive to hold utilities). That is
normal for the win98se startup.

You edit your config.sys file in boot disk
enter. If you have a driver floppy or CDROM, you will be having a .sys driver file.

Device=pathname\driverfile

in autoexec.bat

mscdex for parameters get help from any windows machine.

Thanks for the info guys, I used a bit of it all. Booting direct from cd-rom didnot work here, and I tried to keep the switch of cd-rom players as a last possibility.

This is what I did (maybe someone could use this information):

I created a dos startup disk, and copied sys.com and mscdex.exe on it. I booted the computer using this diskette and typed

sys c:

after booting. This way the c: drive became bootable. Now I installed the driver for the cd-rom player. Make sure the path to your mscdex.exe is right in the autoexec.bat afterwards (otherwise edit it). I copied the mscdex.exe to c:. Now reboot (from the harddrive). It should find your cd-rom player now. Afterwards start installation from cd (I deleted the files from c: before installing windows).

Works fine now.