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Kitteness

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I just bought a computer from www.intellsale.com for super cheap. I am putting it together for my 10 yr old daughter for all our old windows95 games that don't seem to work well on my new compuke. Its Hewlitt Packard 200 mhz. It didn't come with an OS(I didn't expect one) and I figured I would just flip my old hard drive in from my first computer and its OS would boot it up. Wrong. I get the Window95 picture then an error. It says "divide overflow error". I also tried using the boot disk from my old PackardBell I get an error there too. It says it cant find my CD rom. I looked in my Bios and cannot figure out how to assign drives(C,D &F)The two hard drives and the cdrom show up under the IDE devices but I dont see anything stating a drive letter assignment.
OK, I am blonde but I do need help. I always learn stuff by blowing it up. But I would like to do this right. Any recommended Web sites that would have info on Dos? I have been in Dos mode but I (duh)don't know a **** thing about dos. I have a floppy with a cdrom driver but don't know how to load it in dos. But that still leaves the dillemma of which drive it is.
HElP, Please. Thanks in advance
 
It is not surprising that dropping the old drive in the new machine does not work. Win95 is not as good as Win98 at finding peripherals and drivers. When you drop a drive in a new machine EVERY SINGLE THING in the machine has changed and has to be accounted for by the operating system. You are probably going to have to wipe the drive clean and reload windows from scratch. This means if the games you want are on that drive, you are going to have to put it back in the machine it came out of and back it up somehow. I would suggest trying to load Win98 because it is better with drivers. It is often very hard to figure out what each component in an old computer is and find the drivers for them if windows can't do it for itself. Do you have any literature or drivers for any components in this machine? It is also not surprising that it can't find your CDrom, that is a newer feature. Older machines had to have the cdrom drivers on the boot disk. The first thing I would try is making a win98 boot floppy on another machine (you must have another machine, you posted this) and use it to boot your old, er old new machine. I can't remember if Win95 boot disks had cdrom drivers or not but I know that win95 would not recognize my cdrom without manually loading the drivers but a win98 disk works just fine. Anyway, it has basic cdrom drivers on it, see if that lets you access the cd. Then you can load windows. You can boot your machine with a win98 boot disk and still load win95 if you choose to do so. If that doesn't work try option #2, there should be an executable file on the cdrom driver floppy (file ending in .exe) that you can run from dos to load the cdrom drivers. Choose the a drive by typing a:, see what is in it by typing dir, and run by typing the name of the file. If this doesn't work, you have to figure out what model the cd rom is and search for the drivers for it. Finding drivers isn't hard if you can figure out what drive it is. Try the manufacturers website or there are driver sites, just run an internet search. Last resort option: if you can't figure out what model the cdrom is, the easiest thing might be to just buy a new cheap one, they're down to $30 for cheapies, and it will come with drivers. You shouldn't need to know anything about DOS except how to change drives, change directories, and execute a file.

Your hard drive will always be drive C. In dos, your cdrom will be drive D (assuming you only have one hard drive). When loading Win98, it loads a temp virtual drive to drive D so your cdrom becomes drive E. Can't remember if this was the case in Win95 or not so just be aware of it. Just try both.

Of course, once you get the cdrom recognized, you have to pray that everything else is recognized and you don't have to search for more drivers. Did they give you drivers for anything in this machine or are you completely on your own with no operating system loaded?

Good luck.
 
There are actually a few things you can try.
The easiest way is to format the drive and start clean. That way, everything is detected and installed fresh.

Your other option is to see if you can boot into Safe Mode, go into Device Manager, and delete all of the system device entries, plus delete any of the equipment from your original machine. Anything that's listed there is probably from the old machine, but just delete the things you know have changed.

Drive letters are determined by the OS, not the system BIOS. All the BIOS does is pass the info about the drives to the OS. The OS then sets letters, or mount points as the case may be.

bglad> Win95's boot disk does not contain CD-ROM drivers. Indeed, the best bet would be to use a Win98 boot disk, but the issue there might be that if Win95 is going to be used, the drives will need to be formatted in FAT16.
Win95 machines did not have the CD-ROM drivers on a boot disk, if that is what you meant by older system.
The problem actually probably lies in the fact that the IDE controller is probably being incorrectly detected. I would bet my house that the system is running in Compatibility Mode, and the CD-ROM is not detected when that's the case.



------------------
From another BBS:
"hmm... Cyrix III, huh? You can put syrup on sh*t, but that don't make it pancakes."
 
Kiteness-follow our discussion and you will figure this out

Dan,
1. So we agree she needs to wipe this drive

2. The reason I didn't suggest going in to safe mode and deleting devices is it was my understanding that she wasn't booting into Windows far enough to even get there. In addition, this requires a pretty advanced user, ESPECIALLY with win95. She has to know exactly what to delete. Know how to get the right stuff back, and know how to deal if she deletes something incorrectly.

3. You are absolutely right about the drive letters, add that to my explanation above on which drives get named which letter.

4. The Fat 16 issue only becomes relevant if you fdisk the drive, not if you just re-format or wipe it. If you do fdisk with a win98 boot disk, it will ask if you want to enable Fat32 and you have the choice of saying no. Kiteness, you have to use Fat16 if you are loading win95.

5. As far as compatability mode, that would be a good guess but she is not even booting so she's not getting to that point. I was confused as well by the place where she said all drives were recognized but I think she meant in the bios, not windows.
 
bglad> To respond to your points:

1) Not exactly, but that would certainly be the easiest and quickest course of action.
The best course of action from a troubleshooting standpoint would obviously be to determine and resolve the problem, allowing the original install to remain along with the installed applications.
However, from a standpoint of time, it would probably be quicker for the average novice to format/reinstall.

2) The point of getting into Safe Mode is that it's a diagnostic mode. Being able to boot into it will prove/disprove any possible variables on whether it's the system or the OS.
Originally, the post said:
I get the Window95 picture then an error
Click to expand...
This tells me that it gets as far as starting to load Win95, then the problems occur. If the problems are device related, it's very possible that booting to Safe Mode is likely.

3) Thanks for your support.
smile.gif


4) Mostly correct, except to the uninitiated, this part can get confusing. Booting from the Win98 boot disk does ask if you want to partition as FAT32, but in a veiled way.
In reality, it asks if you want to "Enable Large Disk Support". If you answer Yes, it's FAT32; if you answer No, it's FAT16.
Not a big deal, but a major point of confusion for many users.

5) Probably in the BIOS, but many older BIOS'es don't make specific mention of the CD-ROM. I know that if I go into IDE auto-detect on most of my old and new motherboards, it doesn't recognize that a drive is setup for that IDE channel.
The only BIOS I've seen that does make specific detection of a CD-ROM is the Phoenix BIOS on my gf's dad's Tyan Tsunami BX board.


------------------
From another BBS:
"hmm... Cyrix III, huh? You can put syrup on sh*t, but that don't make it pancakes."
 
To add to this topic (not to argue
smile.gif
if you have win 95 b it supports fat 32. I've done a few of my friends pc's and tried using win 98 boot disks and ran into problems. I made up a generic boot disk that seems to work on about anything windows. I'm no expert and don't claim to be. Usually you run into problems trying to run AMD K62's above 350 on win 95 because of someones error in programming. Yuck I said AMD
wink.gif
 
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