I burnt myself five of the R51 recovery disks, but they don't seem to work. I get an error

CDR101: Not ready reading drive X
Abort, Retry, Fail?

No matter which options I do nothing works and I get a command prompt C:\... The only thing I can punch in with any sort of response is command.com which isn't really useful..

Any ideas?
Thanks

Buy/borrow another drive comes to mind...
Or try a CD cleaner... (I doubt if that will do the trick though).

No, its a software issue. I have three cd drives that fit, and another boot disk works fine

Not in my experience.

Are you booting from Rescue & Recovery disk?

From disk 1, yes

Disk1 is not bootable, is it?

It is. When I boot from the cd, it says Starting windows 98, stuff stuff stuff and then eventually stops at the CDR101: Not ready reading drive X error

That's a bad/dirty disk or a flaky media drive. Period.

Don't think so.

I've tried a usb disk drive, and it doesn't get as far. I think this is because it doesn't have the correct drivers for it? At the bit where it says "drive x has the correct media" it instead says "drive x has no media"

Regarding the internal drives, all of them get to the same part and fail.

I've made a video, but I think I'm just going to reburn the disk.

You're free to think whatever you choose, we live in "the land of the free"...

With that said, I've seen that error hundreds of times and it *always* was a bad/dirty disk, flaky media drive or a combination of the two...

Well, turns out it was a software problem. From the 5 isos I had, neither was the Rescue/Recovery disk. I downloaded that and burnt it, seemed to work. Also downloaded 7 other isos. Burnt them as the machine asked for it.. Until I got to disk 7, where it kept asking me for disk 7...

Didn't manage to work. I don't mind. Just was doing it to see how it worked. I put a backup image of the machine I made earlier on it and all is well.

I'm pretty sure that I've asked earlier in this thread whether you were booting from a Rescue and Recovery disk...

Had you been doing that, and getting the aforementioned error, it would've been exactly what I said.

Now, you can choke it to the most common cause of all troubles large and small - human error.

Finally, just as FYI:

This particular set is 7 disks + R&R for a grand total of 8. All are needed for a successful recovery.

If you figure out which one you're missing, I'll be happy to burn it for you.

I had all eight, it just seemed to cut out after it finished disk #7, and restarted and went about asking for disk 1.

It isn't much big a deal though. I have XP running and all the drivers are fine.