no d: drive?

[blindkornkid8]

hey guys, this is my first thread so hey.

K well heres the thing, i formated my C drive and got a boot disk cuz i wanted to wipe everything and just restart with windows 95. Well like i said i formated C drive then typed d: and it said invaled drive(or something like that). So yes its not detecting the D drive so i cant install windows with the cd. I dont really know alot about dos so i'm lost here. any help would be greatly appreciated.

[the_adairs]

Just a couple of questions here first, and Im sure a few others are going to be asking several as well. Do you have a hard drive that is partitioned into a c and d drive? Or do you have two seperate hard drives? Are you using a boot cd for the windows 95 or is it just a standard cd? Not sure where the d drive command is coming from, i.e what your trying to do on the d drive if all you have is c.

[rcgreen]

OK, the D drive is the CDROM drive, right?
You have to go to another computer.

Go to Start-->Settings-->Control Panel-->Add Remove Programs

There should be a tab there for creating a startup disk.
If all goes well, this startup floppy will have the necessary
CDROM driver so you can access the CDROM from DOS
and start the installation.

[the_adairs]

Smacks head as he was over analyzing the problem.*L*

[blindkornkid8]

ya heres to answer some or ur questions, my hard drive is just c:, my d: is the cd rom and i made the boot disk from the add/remove programs. and ya i formated everything and ran dos off the boot disk and went to go look at d: and it said invalid drive. As for the windows cd its just the installation cd, u might be able to boot from it but i wouldnt know cuz i cant use the d: drive. help

[avdven]

Rcgreen's got the right idea. It sounds like you're trying to install via your CD when you boot the computer off of an empty C: drive, and that won't work because then no CD drivers are loaded into the memory. If you have a BIOS which supports booting off of a CD-ROM, try that. Otherwise, as rcgreen suggested, make a boot disk (a Win95, Win98 or WinME boot disk will work fine, as long as you don't do format c: /s with it because you may install the wrong DOS version).

AJ

Edit: Actually, this all depends on what sort of CD-ROM you have. If you're running Windows 95, you may be using a CD-ROM which isn't attached to the IDE port on the computer (it may have it's own ISA card). If this is the case, you'll have to dig up the floppy disk that came with your CD-ROM and, once you're in DOS, install it. Then, when you restart, booting off of the C: drive, it should load the necessary drivers for the CD-ROM. It sounds as if the bootdisk you're using isn't recognizing your CD-ROM drive, and this is most likely the culprit.

[blindkornkid8]

ha and thats exactly what i did, format c:. So i guess i have no Cd drivers on it, well can someone help me on fixing this?

[avdven]

If you read the edit to my last post, I think it should solve your problem.

Note: (not directly towards you, but in general) Always know exactly what your hardware configuration is before formatting because if you don't, you may be surprised when nothing works if/when you finally install Windows...

AJ

[problemchild]

Well, as avdven said, is it attached to an IDE controller, or is it attached to a proprietary controller card? If it's the former, a standard Windows boot disk should work fine. If it's the latter, you either need the driver disk that came with the drive or you need to search Google and find some drivers.

Basically, you're stuck unless you can find the right drivers for it somewhere.

If you can find the disk, you can boot from the Windows boot disk and format c: /q /s to transfer the system files to C. It doesn't matter about it being the wrong version, because Windows will overwrite it with the correct version during the installation. Then install the drivers from your disk and reboot from C. You should have a working CD-ROM. At least in theory. :/

[allenb1963]

I just zipped a Win98 boot disk for you and am uploading it. Unzip it to a floppy and you'll be just fine. Call me crazy, but I don't remember Win95 boot disks having CD drivers included. BTW, after booting with this disk you're about to make, your CD will be your E: drive...D: will be a virtual RAMdrive.