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rickyr

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PC won't boot from CD-Rom

Hi...
I have a P133 16 megs 6.4gig Master 850meg Slave and a Cyberdrive 120D.
In BIOS I have set boot from cd first. When I put win95 cd or Solaris x86 in the cd drive, heres the error....
found CDROM: CD-ROM TW120D
Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: failure...
regards
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rmarotta

In order for it to be bootable, the CD that is used to boot from must have a bootstrap code recorded onto it.
I have no experience with the Solaris x86, but the Win95 CD does not have it.
Therefore, it won't boot.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Ralph


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ASKER

Hi Ralph.
A friend of mine just fdisk'd his drive then booted from the Win95 CD then installed win95. (Although I don't no the particulars of his setup). Lets ignore the Solaris issue for now and try and get my PC to boot from the win95 CD, which I know is possible. Could it be my hardware setup?. Master, Slave, Master with Slave present, Jumper settings?
Heres the rest of my points, I'm cleaned out now.
regards
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rmarotta

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Also, if you need it, I can help you with the proceedure to install Win95 from scratch using a boot floppy & your CDROM device driver file with the Win95 CD.
Just ask.
Ralph

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ASKER

Hiya Ralph.....
I double checked with my friend and it appears that he had a boot floppy and his win95
CD in the PC when he installed.
Taking onboard what you said about boot blocks, this, I now realise is why the Solaris CD
won't boot, you see I tried this from a backup CD and so the data in the boot block area of the CD could be anywhere, or missing. I will try this with the original in the next few days.
BTTP I would still like to boot from a CD though. Do you know how I can burn a boot block
onto the begining of a CD?????? I know this is not the same as the original question, but I know a little more from your expert advice and now know exactly what I require. Heres another 5, hope you can help.
regards

No problem Rick.
Try here for lots of info about burning a bootable CD:

http://aix.ora.nsysu.edu.tw:8080/bootcd02.htm

I hope it helps.
Ralph

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ASKER

Ralph
Wow! your responses are so quick. Thanks for bearing with me on this.
Other experts get annoyed when the terms of the question alters. But this was only due
to my ignorance in the begining.
Thanks again for you expert help Ralph
regards, Rick
Thanks, it was my pleasure, Rick!

For a disk to be bootable it must contain the files
IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS
Not necessarily, my friend!
You won't find them on my NT4 CD.
Ralph