From: Peter Wennersten (wennerst_at_iue.it)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2000 - 09:01:50 EST
Dear all,
I have now reformatted the harddrive and have finally managed to find a
friend with standard WIN98 install-CD. After many freezes during install
I have a working WIN98.
But I realize that this is sooo different from the way my TP 570 come
preloaded. Not only all the system goodies and but also the more
important system drivers and TP specific configurations. (E.g. I can
only access one of the two 2 gig
partitions on my HDD; the PCMCIA slot does not react when plugging in
PC-card, must boot with card plugged in for driver to load; the screen
cannot be set to 800x600; I have no sound; just to mention a few
irritable things).
So I have not given up getting the recovery CD to work, but alas, I need
help for this. I hope there is still interest in the list to look at my
problem... which to sum up goes something like this:
Purpose: Recreating preloaded disk image.
Basic problem:
Have no internal CD drive. Thus cannot boot from recovery CD. Must use a
recovery boot diskette in order to establish connection to external
PCMCIA CD drive and then recover from CD. However, this does not work
because boot diskette only supports 3 PCMCIA CD drives and mine is not
among them.
Booting from regular boot diskette and loading DOS drivers for my CD
works, but from then on there is no executable file on the recovery CD
that I can run in order to start the recovery process. I seem to be
dependent on the shell that is loaded when booting from the recovery
diskette.
So I have tried faking support for my CD drive by exchanging the drivers
for the supported CD drives and putting my driver in their stead. This
yields no result, not even error messages (upon loading the driver the
CD drive starts spinning but this is just warming-up, after a few
seconds it relaxes and nothing else happens). I don't know if I have to
change any settings. This seems difficult though as the whole recovery
process is embedded in the IBM shell and I cannot edit the executables
that are part of this shell. The closest I have gotten was when I simply
used the driver for one of the supported CD drives. Then the shell
programme continued and prompted me to insert bootable CD in CD drive
and
click enter. So I did but I got a "CDR101: error reading drive Z". But I
have no clue what to do next.
No one around me uses a PCMCIA CD drive that is supported which I
can borrow. It seems to the layman that I need to pick apart the
files/shell on the recovery CD in order to make further changes to the
shell programme. Can this be done? Can I download some shareware for
this purpose? Or does anyone with programming skills feel like having a
look at it?
I also tried copying the lot from the recovery CD to C: but how do I
fool the machine to boot from the catalogue with the recovery CD content
and not starting loading Windows as usual?
As ever, very grateful to everyone who takes an interest in helping me
out.
/Peter
-- Peter Wennersten Researcher in the Dept. of Social & Political Sciences European University Institute
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