Latitude BIOS

Here's the whole story. My daughter bought this Latitude from a friend of hers at college. It's an A300ST that's been "refurbished" (according to a tag on the underside), so I don't know what hardware has been altered. It came with a docking port, the Windows 95 OS, and an OEM WIN 95 CD, which does not appear to be part of the original equipment. (There's a tag on the top of the case that says the computer has a P II chip designed for WIN NT/98.) In attempting to upgrade the OS I made a mistake - I upgraded to 98 with a generic CD, then upgraded that with a WIN 98 SE CD that was designed for a Compaq PC. When I went to the Dell website to find out how to recover from this error, the advice I saw said to reformat the hard drive. When I did that I was reduced to the DOS base OS and nothing would load from the CD ROM drive. I've been into BIOS and set it for the CD ROM to boot first, and still nothing happens when I put anything in the CD ROM. In DOS, the only drive letters I can access are C and D - the partitioned hard drive. This machine has no internal or external floppy drive with it, so I either have to make the CD ROM work somehow, remove the hard drive and load Windows from one of my PC's, or use this one as a door stop.

If you can help me restore this machine I will personally nominate you for sainthood.

Thanks again. Your advice is excellent. I wish I could take advantage of it.

THANK YOU, man. I'll try it. I have CD RW's and Nero on two of my PC's and boot disks to copy. I'll let you know.

 When loading W98/98SE, you need a W98 boot floppy diskette to boot the CDROM and Install the CDROM drivers. This OS CDs are not self booting UNLESS you have a proprietory Dell Recovery CD for W98SE; that one is, but they were only shipped and available with new Dells.

There is a way of booting the CDROM without a Floppy Drive. If you have a PC running either Roxio or Nero and a CDRW drive, you can make a boot image copy of a W98 Boot Disk on a CDR and use that to boot the CDROM, install the drivers and then allow a hotswap for the W98 OS CD. It makes your CDROM into A: drive until you type and enter a DOS switch to the CD Drive letter and then hotswap for the OS CD. You can also use it for Fdisk, Format, Scandisk in DOS, Chkdsk etc.( all the DOS Tools). I have one I made in this way and I seldom use the Boot Floppy any more. You make a W98Boot Disk first, then if using Roxio/Adaptec, you start by clicking Make Data CD; when the project screen comes up, you click File/New CD Project/Bootable CD and then follow directions to make the Boot CDR.

If unsuccessful, contact me at padtea@msn.com

Message Edited by leduke30 on 06-15-2004 02:26 PM