Quickie CD Driver(s) question

[Bounty Bob]

Hiya,

Just a quick question about CD Drivers.

I want to format my hard drive and reinstall Windows 2000 Pro (drastic I
know, but after 2 months of battling with problems - initially caused by
viruses before I got my firewall - it seems to be the easiest option).

I know from reading some of these posts that I can begin the CD setup and
delete the existing partition. However if the partition is deleted and I
restart the PC, how does it know how to read the CD?

Bear in mind that the last OS I installed was Win95 where I had to copy the
CD drivers onto a floppy. Then boot from the floppy to install the drivers
before I could run the setup on the CD. That's probably old-hat now and CD
interfaces are standardised, dunno, that's why I'm asking ;-)

Cheers

Rob

 

[XMan]

Ok if your CD drive will allow you to boot from it then there is no issue -
you may need to have a look at the boot order in BIOS to make sure it's
before the hard drive.

Boot from CD - The text based setup will start - you can opt to delete the
partition then recreate a new boot partition. Setup will copy enough files
on to make the partition bootable and bobs your uncle.

If the system will not boot from the CD drive then you will need something
like a win98 recovery diskette that will boot DOS and load the OAK CD rom
drivers and MSCDEX. Then you can run setup from the CD

Hope this helps

Mike

 

[Bounty Bob]

Yeah, I think I'm OK then. My BIOS "is" set to boot from CD. If I have my
Win2k CD in the drive it will AutoRun. I always assumed that, despite
having the boot order set to CD then HD, the BIOS would read driver
information from the HD if it couldn't find a CD Rom. So how, if the HD is
freshly formatted, does my PC know how to read from the CD? Have CD Rom's
been standardised so that a default driver stored within the BIOS (I guess)
can find and read any modern CD Rom?

 

[Dan Seur]

The BIOS is hardwired to look on media (in the order you have set) for a
file in a certain place that tells BIOS that medium is bootable. BIOS
will search all media on the list you gave it, and start the boot using
the first such file it discovers. If the order is CD then HDD0, and the
CD drive is empty or a CD in it doesn't have that file in that place,
BIOS will boot from HDD0. If the CD drive contains a CD with that file
in that place, BIOS will boot from that CD, and HDD0 will have nothing
to do with the boot process. Whether HDD0 is empty or bootable doesn't
matter.

 

[Bounty Bob]

Gotcha. Cheers for that.

The BIOS is hardwired to look on media (in the order you have set) for a
file in a certain place that tells BIOS that medium is bootable. BIOS
will search all media on the list you gave it, and start the boot using
the first such file it discovers. If the order is CD then HDD0, and the
CD drive is empty or a CD in it doesn't have that file in that place,
BIOS will boot from HDD0. If the CD drive contains a CD with that file
in that place, BIOS will boot from that CD, and HDD0 will have nothing
to do with the boot process. Whether HDD0 is empty or bootable doesn't
matter.