DJW wrote:
On Feb 18, 7:05 pm, "philo" wrote:
"DJW" wrote in message

...



My laptop's internal DVD player stopped working a year or more ago. It
is not a software problem but hardware that was confirmed already. Now
my laptop will not boot. The battery is dead and the cord became
unplugged from the transformer as it was starting up. Now it asks for
the A drive floppy disk but cannot get back to C drive. Am I screwed?
I can't get it to boot in safe mode or any way other than the start up
98 floppy. The external USB drive is an Iomega. Is there a way to use
the boot floppy with added USB CD drivers for the Iomega on it to get
it to work and if so what would I need to do? How would I put the
drivers on the floppy? I also have a backpack external parallel CD-Rom
drive that also can be run from a PCMCA card I have. Would I have a
better chance of using the Windows 98 CD with it through that type of
interface? Or is my only option to try to track down and buy a CD-Rom
for the inside of the computer. I tried running scandisk with the
floppy booted up but it said something like could not find the boot
log for C drive.
Check the bios and be sure your HD is even detected
and of course listed as a boot option.
If your HD is not detected it has probably failed...
but to me it sounds like your bios setting may have been lost when the cord
was pulled

The hard drive shows as detected being there and the boot order has CD
first then a then c. also because the CD is bad that is not detected
at startup. I brought up some screen that indeed shows the info about
the hard drive and it being there on the bus. Some time during the
startup it says the boot record for the hard drive is not found or
something to that fact. Would it help if I list here the exact wording
that the computer is telling me at startup?
One other thought I have a flash/jump drive would it be possible to
copy the win 98 installer CD to it and try to install with it. What
would be the a prompt I need to type in to get the USB to load? When
things were working it was D drive. In the boot order can I add drive
letters or is that just for IDE bus's items?

1) not really, your boot sector is toast.
2) you can list it here, but I don't think that it will hold the clue to
solve it
3) flash drive might work if your computer recognizes the usb port in an
early stage of the boot
4) you can only pick media that your computer registers at boot up.

If you start with the floppy, you have the options install windows
/command prompt only / with or without cd drive or something like that ?
Then you could choose command prompt only and you're left with a c:\
the Dos prompt. then you could type there [ scandisk /all ] to find
out what is wrong. or [ scandisk /? ] to see all your options.
If your start-up disk doesn't bring you there try a dos boot disk and
take the same solution.
Let us know how it goes/works