My friend lost his original bootdisk for his Texas Instrument Laptop
which comes with a modular bay to swap out the floppy drive for the CD
rom drive. Windows 98SE will now only boot into safe mode. He doesn't
want to just reformat the drive as he has documents/files on the drive
that he wants to keep. The bios only allows booting from the A or C
drives so it ignores the Win98 CD at bootup if he replaces the A drive
with the CD-ROM drive. If he boots from a floppy using generic CDROM
drivers, he get's an error message since the CDROM drive is missing.
What are his options to re-install or fix Win98SE?
Thanks for any and all suggestions.
Arawak

Tell him to go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and create a
Windows 95 boot floppy. This will install DOS 7.0, which is sufficient
to install or reinstall Windows 98. Use the boot floppy to start the
laptop, type "copy a:\*.* c:\", then "sys c:". Then remove the floppy
drive, install the CD drive and restart. Note that the CD drive may be
assigned drive letter "R:".

Ben

"Arawak" <nospam@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:t527uv86ogajbkkgu6tlmtljq1gg292l3o@4ax.com...

Thanks for the suggestion. I had thought of that except that since he
can only access Windows in safe mode, he won't be able to access the
internet (modem driver won't be installed). Maybe I can mail him a
floppy sinced he lives out of state. I pretty much did that anyway via
phone. I had him start up "sysedit" while in safe mode, and had him
add lines in the config.sys and autoexec.bat file (similar to the ones
on my boot floppy):

CONFIG.SYS -
device=himem.sys /testmemff
device=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
files=10
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
lastdrive=z

AUTOEXEC.BAT -
path=C:\;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;
smartdrv
LH MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /L:Z

We looked in the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory and copied all the
necessary files to the root (c:\), then since Windows still tries to
autostart, I had him press F8 and used the option to step through the
configuration options, replying no to everything except the batch
processes in the Config.sys and the Autoexec.bat files but when it got
to the MSCDEX line it complained file not found. Ofcourse he could
have made a typo but I had him read it all back to me and it sounded
just fine.

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 01:02:31 GMT, "Ben Myers"
<benjmyers@mindR-E-M-O-V-Espring.com> wrote:

Have you tried restoring an old registry?
Start in dos, type
scanreg /restore

Or if he can get access to the cdrom in safe mode, copy the 98 directory to the hd and
install from there. If you do this, then boot to dos and rename or delete the Windows
and Program Files directories first.


On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:24:47 -0700, Arawak <nospam@hotmail.com> wrote in
24hoursupport.helpdesk:

Perhaps using the full path the filename without the "LH".

C:\WINDOWS\COMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /L:Z

Ben

"Arawak" <nospam@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:32a7uvkgkp5iuv1s9ac2chs0jrh85m0h7u@4ax.com...