A Conversation for The H2G2 Programmers' Corner
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Pastey Posted Jan 21, 2003
Well, you may have noticed exactly how many times I said to check that the boot floppy worked first 
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Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jan 21, 2003
It might also have been productive to ask him *why* he was reformatting... If he needed to repair the Windows setup, he just needed to run "setup.exe" off the CD, then select "copy all files again". If he's doing it to get rid of a persistent virus, then advising him to make a boot disk on that computer and use it to boot with after formatting is probably not the best idea... 
If his machine is new enough to run ME, he probably has a "boot from CD" option, which is far safer in the long run... 
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Pastey Posted Jan 21, 2003
Yeah, but I've had problems with boot from cd before mind. Never quite got the install right. Once it eve reformatted the hard drive but didn't install any cd drivers 
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Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jan 21, 2003
That's a known Windows bug... It happens on motherboards with a VIA chipset. The fix is to copy the VIA "4-in-one" driver (from their website, or off your motherboard CD) to the HDD before installing windows, then installing it immediately after Windows reaches a bootable state - that makes the CD accessible again. 
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Spelugx the Beige, Wizard, Perl, Thaumatologically Challenged Posted Jan 21, 2003
Boot from CD is such a luxury (I now use it for the majority of my Debian installations), I once had to use vfat floppys to copy the entire debian bootstrap to a new computer because the debian installer didn't grok my ATAPI floppy drive. A real pain using a win98 ebd to transport the stuff across.
spelugx -- his 486 had a 4x CD rom and not boot from CD option
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Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jan 21, 2003
spelugx, I've seen a floppy image around somewhere that lets you boot from the floppy and it passes boot control to an ATAPI CD... Sounds like something you might find "handy"...
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Spelugx the Beige, Wizard, Perl, Thaumatologically Challenged Posted Jan 21, 2003
Yeah, but this was a few years back, when the debian boot was ropy (imho), and it was probably something awkward like a SCSI cdrom too, or the computer like made the cdrom look like a fd on boot (really, *really* annoying)
spelugx -- installed SCO too many times, too long ago
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DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) Posted Jan 21, 2003
I had a problem like that, win95 needed to be copied to a laptop with no CD drive, and the copy I had needed spliting on every file, I gave up and wrote at assembler program to do some serial coms
-- DoctorMO --
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- 21: Pastey (Jan 21, 2003)
- 22: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jan 21, 2003)
- 23: Pastey (Jan 21, 2003)
- 24: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jan 21, 2003)
- 25: Spelugx the Beige, Wizard, Perl, Thaumatologically Challenged (Jan 21, 2003)
- 26: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jan 21, 2003)
- 27: Spelugx the Beige, Wizard, Perl, Thaumatologically Challenged (Jan 21, 2003)
- 28: DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) (Jan 21, 2003)
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