Okay, in a CD rom bind

[howard]

Okay, I'm in a bind. I'm building my new PC piece by piece, and the only CD drive I have is the Plextor drive. So where I'm at is trying to get the drive to read my Windows XP CD so that can install my OS. Plextor of course didn't include a floppy disc to use to install the necessary drivers to be able to access the disc. Any ideas? Am I hosed until Monday when Plextor opens to get a disk/files necessary? Any help would be appreciated.

[dodecahedron]

howard, i may be wrong, i'm no exprert, but i don't think you need any drivers.
just set up your BIOS to boot from the CDROM (AFAIK all new BIOSes let you choose the CDROM drive to be the boot device), place the WindowsXP CD in the drive and reboot, your computer will reboot directly to the CD and install the OS.

good luck.

[blakerwry]

yeah, ditto. Under boot order you can select the CD as a boot device before your HDD. This way when you boot, your CD drive is checked for a bootable CD...


If for some reason this does not work, You can borrow a winME or win98 startup disk. These disks contain generic drivers for most CD drives and in my experience have always allowed me access to the CD drive.

to make one, goto control panel -> add/rem programs -> startup disk

[Flyer22]

some older drives do need drivers but all the actual ones don´t it kinda plug and play

[vxd*.*]

[quote="dodecahedron"]howard, i may be wrong, i'm no exprert, but i don't think you need any drivers.
just set up your BIOS to boot from the CDROM (AFAIK all new BIOSes let you choose the CDROM drive to be the boot device), place the WindowsXP CD in the drive and reboot, your computer will reboot directly to the CD and install the OS.

good luck.[/quote]

THAT IS THE ONLY WAY. GOOD ADVICE.

[blakerwry]

That certainly isnt the only way to install winXP... not all BIOS's allow booting from a CD Drive.. esp SCSI CD drives....


So what do these people do?


They can boot using a bootdisk... then they navigate to the CD and run the setup from DOS.

I always do this when installing win95, 98, and NT... I find it doesn't make much of a difference in winME, 2k, and XP...

although you might be able to load smartdrive if you had your own bootdisk.... that would probably halve the installation time.

[EEG161]

Microsoft has WinXP boot disk sets available for download at their site or download center. I think it's a set of 4 files. You download, then extract to floppy disks. See>>http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q310994
Theres an XP home and an XP pro version. be sure to get the correct one. You can't use one for the other & vice-versa. Hth.

[Dartman]

If it's a SCSI Plex sometimes you will need the drivers for your SCSI card on the boot floppy or it wont find the card then no cd rom. I had to make a special one by adding my Advansys card driver to a 98 boot disk back when I was using 98. If I'd had a IDE reader or a more common card at the time that wouldn't have been a problem.
Now XP has the drivers in it for most SCSI cards so that shouldn't be the problem it used to be, you just have to let it know to search for add on cards and if prompted give it the drivers disks if it's not in it's data base.
If it's a IDE drive you shouldn't have any problems at all, just put in the disks for XP and go as long as it's set to boot from cd rom in the bios.

[EEG161]

I don't know about XP, but when installing W2K Pro, if you use the CD, you don't get prompted to enter a volume label after formatting.
Thats why I use a Win98se StartUp Disk. Fdisk, format and then I enter my volume labels.