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OffTopic > Installing Windows Help?

#75207 - jake2431 - Sat Mar 11, 2006 12:31 am

Hello, I'm trying to fix my aunt and uncles computer. The harddrive stopped working so I bought them a new one and put it in. Now I am trying to install windows back on it with no luck. It is an old computer and they have Windows 95 for it. When I put in the floppy restore disc and the windows 95 cd it will began to run the restore disc, then it will look for the cd-rom disc. Well, it can't find the cd-rom drive. It says "Unable to determine CD-ROM" and then "ErrorLevel is 100". Can anyone help me out here?

-Jake

#75215 - tepples - Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:09 am

jake2431 wrote:
Hello, I'm trying to fix my aunt and uncles computer [...] It is an old computer and they have Windows 95 for it.

The computer has Windows 95, which means it was built before mid-1998 when major OEMs moved to Windows 98. Is there a reason that they would be happy with a PC that is older than my DDR-playing cousin as their primary desktop machine?

Quote:
The harddrive stopped working so I bought them a new one and put it in. Now I am trying to install windows back on it with no luck. When I put in the floppy restore disc and the windows 95 cd it will began to run the restore disc, then it will look for the cd-rom disc. Well, it can't find the cd-rom drive. It says "Unable to determine CD-ROM" and then "ErrorLevel is 100". Can anyone help me out here?

Does it give you an A:\> prompt at this point? If so, can you do c: and get a C:\> prompt? If not, have you tried fdisking and formatting the hard drive using Windows 95's DOS mode or using FreeDOS? If the drive is significantly larger than the one you removed, have you followed the steps on Microsoft's large hard disk support page?

Does the computer's real-time clock keep accurate time? If not, you need to replace the battery on the motherboard, or the firmware will go back to default settings every time you start. A PC from 1995-1998 usually stores firmware settings in battery-backed SRAM, not flash like on the Nintendo DS.

There are a few diagnostic programs available at bootdisk.com. You might want to look for one dedicated to diagnosing hard disk and CD-ROM problems (look for keywords ata, ide, atapi).
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#75223 - jake2431 - Sat Mar 11, 2006 2:07 am

Thanks, I will look into all of this. The reason that they are using such an old computer is because they no pretty much nothing about computers and it gets the job done for them. They can't afford a new one right now, but I am trying to talk them into it in the future.