Evenin' all,
My girlfriend recently went to uni and to help with her studies was given a laptop from her dad. It was an old work laptop so it was full of lots of rubbish she didnt need so she asked me to wipe the hard drive and install windows 98 on it. I formatted and fdisked the drive but when i came to install windows the laptop boots from the cd (setting the ram drive to a: with some small programs on it etc) but says "no valid cdrom device drivers selected" and therefore a cannot do anything more.
The cd drive is an external one if thats of any use.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

Hello and welcome to PCHF Bruce85.

Not sure if we will be able to get the win98 bootdisk to load your CD-ROM but we shall give it a try.

Could you post the exact make/model of the drive.

On the Windows 98 bootdisk there should be two files, config.sys and autoexec.bat, would you be able to zip both of them up and post the zip file onto the forum for me.
I want to check which cd-rom driver the config.sys file is trying to load.

hey,
the label on the back of the cd drive says
Mobile cd-rom PCMCIA premium, designed for toshiba. 2793020-uk.
Im not going to be able to zip the files up for you as i dont have any way of getting the files from the old laptop to the pc im using now, until tomorow when i can go to the shop and buy some floppy disks (unless i can, somehow, access usb flash drives in dos). If its any help im using the windows 98 (original edition) cd as the bootdisk and it says its trying to load OEMCD001 drivers but fails.
Thanks.

That's perfect, I just wanted to double check which driver it was trying to load e.g OEMCD001

I will look for an alternate driver for you, I presume your laptop does have a floppy drive correct

yes it does, its an external usb one that actually works! Ive found a floppy disk to so i might be able to get it fixed before my g/f gets home from uni (hopefully )
Thanks.

Hey Bruce85, sorry for the delay.

Download the attached file and copy it to your desktop
You will need to unzip the file and copy arccd.sys onto the Windows 98 bootdisk.

Then you will need to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat on the bootdisk.
Easiest way to do this would be to either upload both those files onto the site and let someone here do it.

Alternatively when you are in the dos screen you need to type:
EDIT A:\CONFIG.SYS <enter>

There is a line in there that should look something like this
DEVICE=OEMCD001

You need to replace OEMCD001 with ARCCD.SYS

Then save changes and exit.

Now edit your autoexec.bat file by typing:
EDIT A:\AUTOEXEC.BAT <enter>

Look for the following line:
MSCDEX /D:OEMCD001 or something similar, basically delete that whole line a replace it with the following:
LH MSCDEX /D:ARCCD01 /L:E > NUL

You need to type it exact, note that E stands for the Drive letter for the CDROM drive.

Save changes and exit, then reboot your PC and boot off the floppy again.

It should hopefully detect your CDROM drive.








arccd.zip