Installing a hard drive

[steve100100]

I have formatted a hard drive. (format c: /s). No problem. I am now trying to install this drive in another PC. When I plug the drive in and power up the PC, it boots up to c: in DOS. It recognises the hard drive fine. But the PC now does not recognize the floppy or CD drives, so I cannot install windows. Any ideas, anyone?

[j2buttonsw]

You have the bootable system files on the c: drive but no DOS drivers for the CD eg mscdex.exe ( http://www.computerhope.com/mscdex.htm ). I am stumped why it doesn't see the floppy drive though. If you put a bootable windows setup floppy in the system and boot from the floppy first, does it boot?

[smorodina]

I had a strange thing happen when I was installing a new hard drive, all the settings in my bios get corrupted and the boot sequence altered, so it would not boot from floppy. Might be worth checking the bios to make sure the boot sequence is a first then c etc. Or set the bios to defaults.

[j2buttonsw]

I am intreagued why you setup your hard disk this way. You obviously sysed the HDD from a Windows 9x system, why don't you copy the win98 folder from the windows CD to the HDD and install it from there? That is how we used to do Windows 95 systems.For a Windows 2000/XP (and Windows 98 for that matter) installation you can boot from the CD. Or do you like making life hard for yourself?

[catgate]

It sound like the BIOS settings need changing ( you know the trick hit "del" just after it starts to fire up). Make the necessary changes there to ensure it will read A drive is set as primary boot up and then boot up with you Windows rescue disk in the Floppy drive. This will give you CD access. Whilst you are "rescue mode it might be a good idea to run "fdisk" and reformat the replaced C drive. This should teach it a leson it will not want to forget.

[Phantaxus]

go to http://www.bootdisk.com/ download the Windows 98 SE bootdisk - this bootdisk should come with generic CDROM drivers.