Big OOPs I've gone and broken it.

[joshua]

I am setting up my old laptop for the grandchildren its running 98se but in the course of its life I;ve had to replace the cdrom drive, I managed to get a dvd drive that fitted and worked ok. However because its a dvd drive its not recognised in the bios and will therefore not boot from that drive, Does anyone know of a programme that I can put on a floppy that will let me boot from the dvd drive so at least I can reinstall the OS when they destroy it. I have tried smart boot manager but the cd won't boot the recovery disc. machine is a ibm thinkpad.

I have used the 98se boot disc but still cant boot the cd I can navigate to the cd and on it are:
bootcat bin
bootimg bin
contents lst
dft bat
dft4psg exe (ibm diskchecking untility)
fat16
fat32
hkr98mb ver
hwusmc0 imz
hwusmc1 to 7 imz
lang dir
prime exe
recovery dir
yes
zero dat

tried all the exe's without getting the cd to run the prime exe just gives me a blank blue screen with a flashing curser, it can type into the screen but don't know what commands to give if any.
going into the recovery dir gives
bsec com
disk exe
fat16
fat32
fdisk exe
fmtdrv exe
format com
nopar com
pkunzip exe
reboot com
recover exe
show1 exe
show2 exe
usrbrk bat
wjec11 exe
yes

I have tried most of the exe files without result except for disk exe which has done something and now when I try to boot normally I get the message can't find OS I've done a fdisk/mbr but that didn't work. When I check the partitions in fdisk the os is labeled as unknown? (rats)
any suggestions?
I have been told that all I need to do is type setup at the A:\ when the boot disc is loaded but all I get is bad command or file name.

[towy71]

On LXF cover disks in the /Essential/SBM is SmartBootManager floppy disk image with a rawrite.exe to copy it to floppy from windows

[Rhakios]

I have tried smart boot manager but the cd won't boot the recovery disc. machine is a ibm thinkpad.

On LXF cover disks in the /Essential/SBM is SmartBootManager floppy disk image with a rawrite.exe to copy it to floppy from windows

Ahem! If the CD won't boot the recovery disc, then why should a floppy with the same thing on do any better?

[towy71]

Does anyone know of a programme that I can put on a floppy that will let me boot from the dvd drive so at least I can reinstall the OS when they destroy it.

Ahem! If the CD won't boot the recovery disc, then why should a floppy with the same thing on do any better?

I was only answering a request for a floppy disk to boot the CD

[Rhakios]

So you didn't read the rest of the post then?

[joshua]

I have just tried another floppy, one that starts my desktop recovery off. Its a packard bell floppy naturally it didn't work but thater was a bit in it where it said : scanning drives label
hdd = no hdd I also note that in fdisk under the volume label tag ther is no entry is that right? also apologies for earlier when I said I've tried Smart Boot manager but the cd wont boot the recovery disc is should have been the floppy won't boot the recovery disc. Although it has no problems booting a live linux disc. I suppose this is because there seems to be no setup exe to run on the recovery disc.

[Rhakios]

Has this computer had Linux installed on it? Windows fdisk won't recognise Linux partitions, so you'd need to convert the partition back to one it can recognise with a Linux version of fdisk.

[joshua]

It did have a while ago but I had already formated that partition back to fat32 ready to hand it over. I have now deleted all partitions and set up a primary dos partition and formated it to fat32. but I still can't get the disc to run. there seems to be no setup.exe on the disc to start it off. CDing to the recovery directory and trying to run recovery.exe does nothing. I'm beginning to think I may have to source a 98 disc and try that rather than struggle with the recovery disc. Its annoying because I like to find answers to these little problems.

[Rhakios]

That might be the best option. The only time I used a recovery CD was on someone else's Packard Hell machine. You had to boot from a special floppy to access the recovery CD. They had not looked after the floppy, but I managed to dd an image of it on a Linux box, though I ended up removing the floppy disk with a pair of pliers.

I also had problems with running the recovery disc due to the fact that they had added an internal modem at a later date and this caused the reinstall to hang, until I removed the modem and then reinstalled it afterwards.

Normal Win98 install discs have an setup.exe on them which sets things off, I don't see that in the listings you give above. It could be that without an existing Windows installation to access the disc and with changed hardware, the recovery disc just won't work.

[joshua]

Yes I think the 98 disc is the only way to go. I dod download Edubuntu to see if it would run but it won't I don't think I have enough memory at only 96mb, and DSL is a bit far away from the school systems they are using.

[towy71]

humble apologies, my speed reading and not really grokking the whys and wherefores, doh!

[joshua]

Compared to me hiding a recovery disc in a washing machine you have no problems, thanks to all for all the input

[joshua]

OK all sorted now, I had a nice computer shop run me off a 98se disc and it installed without problems apart from the continual rebooting!!! I thought getting the graphic and sound drivers may have been a bit of a job as the laptop is eight years old but the ibm support had them readily available all I had to do was put in the model number and it took me straight to them. I've always had good service from their support dept Anyway thanks for all the info