dos cd rom invalid drive

[chris]

i fdisked my old computer. i want to load winnt 4.0 server.[nbsp][nbsp]after fdisk i put my disk in the cd rom and could not change drives.[nbsp][nbsp]i got "invalid drive specification.[nbsp][nbsp]i have power and have checked all connections.[nbsp][nbsp]it is a 486.
how do i get the computer to recognize the cd rom.[nbsp][nbsp]what syntax do i use in dos.[nbsp][nbsp]

[Justin]

You have to load up the CD ROM device drivers. NT should have come with a bootable floppy diskette that has the CD drivers on it, and if not you can create a boot disk in Win95/98/NT that will do so.

If that's not an option, maybe try to find the original diskette that came with the CD drive (now that I think about it, I don't think they even come with those anymore...). It's too bad the Windows CD's aren't bootable like RedHat's are (although a 486 won't boot from CD anyway)...

If none of that helps, search for a program called "ctload.exe" (or possibly "ctload.zip") on Lycos FTP search - this is a nice little device driver that loads up without having to boot up into it - it loads the device drivers dynamically, and there's no need for MSCDEX or anything else. I think most CD drives are coming with this now days rather than the outdated MSCDEX.

Hope this helps somehow - either way, the CD drive requires a DOS driver to be accessible - it will never just work automatically :(

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support