Hi all,
I've got a 560X which has an external drive bay with 24X cd drive. Theres no OS on the H Disk.

I've got a WIn 98 boot floppy and modified it to have the drivers for the Cd loaded as per the IBM support site.

Problem I get is that when the floppy boots, juts after saying "starting Win98.." I get a message saying:
"error - There is no available 4K of memory for mapping"
Theres 32M RAM (default) in the machine.

This machine had NT4 on it previously I know, so don't understand why it won't load the Cd now.

Should also say that after that it carries on to boot to the floppy fine.


Any ideas whats happening here?

KG

Is it a real Microsoft labeled disk?

If not you can create a generic one.

I create boot floppies in XP by formatting the disk as an MS-DOS boot disk. Then I pop a Win98 CD in the drive and copy files from the oldmsdos folder over. Basically these are the files that exist on my plain Win98 boot disks.

To do this you need 2 computers. The first one needs to have Windows 98 or higher already installed and have a floppy drive. The second computer will be the one you are attempting to install Windows onto.

Copy the files listed below onto the floppy disk, then put the floppy in the target computer and boot it up.

Config.sys <- You will create this file. I have included steps on how to do this on when booted off the floppy disk.
Autoexec.bat <- same as config.sys
himem.sys
emm386.exe
mscdex.exe
io.sys (hidden,read only, system)
msdos.sys (hidden, read only, system)
xcopy.exe
edit.com
oemcd.sys (this can be any generic cd-rom driver file some are Oakcdrom.sys, mitsumi.sys., etc)
smartdrv.exe
format.com
sys.com
scandisk.exe
fdisk.exe (could be .com I can't remember at the moment)
command.com

Your computer should boot to the floppy drive and greet you with an A:\ prompt. You have some work to do before you can load the CD driver and install Windows.

To create the config.sys file type this at the A:\ prompt

COPY CON CONFIG.SYS

Enter the settings from my example file below. When done push the F6 key and it will save your file.

To create the Autoexec.bat do the same thing as you did for Config.sys except you will insert my example Autoexec.bat contents instead of the config.sys contents. Push F6 when done and it will write your file. Reboot the machine and you should have access to your CD-ROM drive.

Now my config.sys is usually like this:

DEVICE=A:\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICEHIGH=A:\EMM386.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=A:\SMARTDRV.EXE 2048 2048
DEVICEHIGH=A:\OEMCD.SYS /D:OEMCD001

My autoexec.bat file looks like this:

@ECHO OFF
PATH=A:\;C:\;%PATH% <-- The %Path% allows the path to be appended to on the fly without having to modify the PATH statement and rebooting.
LH MSCDEX.EXE /D:OEMCD001
DIRCMD=/O/P <-- When you type DIR at the command prompt this will list folders first then files, in alphabetical order for both.

This should load your cd-driver as drive D (D:\) assuming you only have 1 hard drive and 1 partition in the system.

The smartdrv.exe 2048 2048 creates a 2MB buffer for DOS and Windows. This greatly increases reading from the CD drive.

Now for win98 I usually do the following

1. At the A:\ prompt I enter FDISK and setup my hard drive partition. Remember to make it active. Then reboot. FDISK should ask you if you want to use all the space on the hard drive and mark it as active. Select yes.
2. At the A:\ prompt type in Format C:\ /u/s this will unconditionally format the hard drive and make it bootable.
3. When it's done formatting and copied over the system files I complete it by doing the Windows 98 installation off the hard drive.

1. Go to C:\ by typing in C:\
2. type command c: <- Your prompt should change to resemble C: with no :\. To change it back type in the following: prompt $p$g
3. Create a folder to copy the Windows 98 installation files. I usually create a folder called Win98CAB so it looks like c:\win98cab
4. Copy the Windows 98 installation files into this folder. Type xcopy d:\wind98\*.* c:\win98cab
wait
5. type setup /is <- the /is switch skips disk checking
6. Install Windows 98

The benefit of copying the files to the hard drive is two-fold. First off Windows will never ask you to input the CD. Also installation is far, far faster than reading and copying from the CD-ROM drive.

Good luck.

Temethka, tks for that info. It seemed to mostly follow ok. Some of the files were not in the location referred to on the win98 CD but anyways I got it working with the IBM drive bay loading the CD as well. So am now loading win 98.
Only thing I'm not convinced of, is that C is bootable. The format /s command returned a number of errors initially and then on selecting "fail" from the abort retry fail options it started formatting. But machine would not boot without the floppy still, so I suspect I may have to go back a few steps.

Could be some wasted time with the 98 load but I don't mind too much - its doing it while I work from home today and I'd just like to confirm that the machine will run ok. Not sure how I get it into Windows if it doesn't boot from C once complete (does the old "Win" command work in Win98 ?)

KG

Well, here I am using the 560 and on the web, typing in this posting,so not so bad I guess.
Only probs I've got now are that the machine reports errors on startup saying it cannot find the IBM cd drive and it keeps looking for the a drive as well if I remember correctly.
Update -what it says is:
Starting windows 98,
Then "IBM portable device bay cd-rom/DVD-ROM device driver v.4.0e"
"error: IBM IBM portable device bay card is not present, aborting installation !"
"Device driver not found: 'IBMCD001'
"No Valid CDROM device drivers selected"
"bad command or file name"
then the abort retry or fail options appear


selecting fail makes it boot into win 98 but then theres no cd working (even though it has power and is spinning).
Heres the autoexec & config.sys files:
@echo off
Path=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;a:\;c:\;%path%
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\mscdex.exe /d:IBMCD001
DIRCMD=/o/p

device=C:\WINDOWS\himem.sys
devicehigh=C:\WINDOWS\emm386.exe
device=c:\devbaycd.exe /p:320 /d:IBMCD001

Do these look Ok or any other suggestions pls

Also, how do I get the window to occupy the complete screen. Settings won't let me change from 640x480 so I assume its a driver issue. Which specifcic driver am I lookin to update?


KG