I have a Toshiba Portege something-or-other that’s OS has up and died. It’s so hosed that the drivers that previously ran the external CD drive are no longer working.
No problem, thinks I. Fire up the Win 98 start-up disk and reinstall the OS. If it can’t see, or utilize, the CD drive than I’ll simply load the CD’s drivers onto it and go from there.
But therein lies the rub.
As soon as I load the CD’s drivers onto the system, it tells me to reboot for the drivers to start working.
Huh? I’m in a DOS prompt and anything and everything will be lost when I reboot, including the all important CD drivers.
"try loading the CD-ROM drivers from autoexec.bat."
It’s still pretty early here, and I have to admit, I drank like a fish last night, so forgive me for the, huh? Install it to autoexec.bat? Where? If I’m in the DOS prompt, autoexec isn’t an option for me, is it?
Again, sorry, but DOS is absolutely foreign to me. I think I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not getting through.
"see if after reboot the CD drive has been assigned a drive letter."
Minus the autoexec thingy, it still isn’t listed after a reboot. It tells me during the install that it’s putting it on the C drive, but after the reboot, I’ll be dammed if I can find it.
What I’m trying to do is install it to the ram or install it to a spot where it’ll be loaded straight away. I assume that’s why you mention the autoexec thing, but again, I don’t know how to get there or even really understand the process all that well.
"Do you have a friend with an external USB ZIP drive? You could load Windows from that onto the hard drive."
Nope. None that I can think of. Even if they did, I think I’d still be having the same problem.
"another tricky way is to LAN your laptop and transfer the OS."
If I can’t even handle this, I’m not about to try and tackle it via a LAN. It’s connected to the main desktop, and used to work like a charm, but in it’s death-throws it lost the ability to see anything else.
Doing that from DOS, for me, seems next to impossible.
"So, it is possible, but it will take some effort… and a li’l bit of trial and error…"