CD-ROM won't load WIN98 setup disk

[Guest_imported]

I offered to load my friends new 20 GIG Maxtor hard drive with his WIN98 stuff. I got the PC, and have partitioned and formatted the drive. I keep getting this error:

Error reading drive Z:
Abort,Retry,Fail?

.. everytime setup tries to access the CD-ROM drive. I have the CD-ROM drive set as a primary slave, and the BIOS can find it (I have it set for AUTO). Everything is in order. I have tried my WORKING CD-ROM drive in this computer, but it wouldn't work either. Any ideas on what I could try/what I am doing wrong?

 

[butchrecon]

Could be a bad CD. Have you tried a different CD? James Collins
Field Service Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[tlcscousin]

Are you sure the cd-rom is drive Z?
Normally the cd-rom would be drive D maybe even E.The only way it would be Z is if you have a major amount of partitions.
Watch the bot up and when it finds the cd-rom it will tell you the drive letter for the cd-rom.
Novell would put the cd-rom to the last drive letter in 3.12 windows usually puts it to D or E.

 

[Jakespeare]

You might have the jumpers screwed up.

It's more complex to have the CD-ROM on the primary.
Just put it BY ITSELF on the Secondary PCI / IDE CHANNEL.

First: Get the CD-ROM off of the primary.

2nd) Use a Windows 98 SE boot disk.
> At the a: prompt, choose ENABLE CD-ROM

It will find it, or give you a message saying, "no atapi device found", etc, and keep loading.

> You also might not have the BIOS configured correctly.
If you have been playing around in the BIOS, then you should reset it to defaults and reboot to the FLOPPY.

> Then reboot again, and change the OS / TO PLUG & PLAY.

I would suggest using your working CD-ROM again like you did. That was a good move for testing.

Good luck.

 

[ceh4702]

If you only have one hard drive and one CD ROM make the HD the primary on the firste EIDE and the CD as the primary on the other EIDE. Some CD ROM's have a jumper that can be set to cable select also. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[paparazi]

Put the rom on secondary IDE as master (set jumper to M)
reset the CMOS,(little jumper next to the battery normally needs bridging out for a few seconds)
Go into bios and set to default settings.
fdisk again delete and give primary dos partitian (just to make sure)
Reformat
And setup! should! should be OK! Martin

 

[Guest_imported]

I tried all of that, no go. It turned out the drive was bad after all, but for some reason my WORKING CD-ROM wouldn't work in it either. I told him and he gave me his dad's CD-ROM out of his computer. It worked for some reason, problem solved. I am so thankful for all of your help, this board is the best!

BTW, I couldn't the BIOS to see the CD-ROM when I hooked it up to the secondary IDE. Kind of odd, huh?