CD Rom access from BIOS

[Woodson]

Hmmm, I've got myself in a pickle folks.
Wanting some friendly and helpful advice to get into BIOS and activate my cd rom driver so I can re-apply my graphics / Video accelerator. I uninstalled the graphics driver because I was trying to install another feature from the Graphics/Video disc that was suppose to be installed first.

Now I can't get access to WIN98 (I'm in XP atm) so I'm hoping someone can instruct me to get into BIOS and activate the CD Rom player so I can run the cd rom disc from safe mode.

Any takers... ??

Thanks

 

[jim boy]

Have to say, I'm not too sure what you want. If you've unistalled the graphics driver, in either 98 or XP, the system, the system will still run fine in VGA.

Have you tried starting up in VGA mode either by selecting "Enable VGA Mode" when using startup options or by editing the boo.ini to include the /BASEVIDEO optin?

And if that isn't your problem, what is? As there is no thing as start cdrom in safe mode option from within the bios? Are you having trouble geting into the bios? (usually press <DEL> or <F1> around 5 seconds after turning power on)

 

[Mr Q]

If you need to fix a video driver you don't want to boot from your CD at all - that said if you really do you need to change settings in your BIOS as JimBoy said. You could also try F2, Ctrl-Alt-Ins, F8 and F10, all of which are options on computer I've seen. If none of the above work, then you need to go to the web site of your manufacturer (if you have a brand name machine) or your motherboard manufacturer (if you have a run of the mill clone) and hope like hell they have instructions for the BIOS.

However unless you have disabled the CDROM in the BIOS this won't help a lot. If XP can't detect the CDROM either and it was working OK before you could check the BIOS, but since you don't know how to get into it there's little chance you've stuffed that - you're more likely to have a dud CD drive.

If however you've managed to disable your CDROM in Win '98 (and it still works in XP) altogether then you have another problem altogether, but not one that you can fix in your BIOS. I don't think this is worth going through unless this is actually your problem.

If you need to fix your video driver in '98 you need to boot the computer in Safe Mode, IIRC that involves pressing F8 during startup just before the '98 splash screen appears. Once Windows starts up in safe mode you need to change your display driver before rebooting. It might help to copy the contents of the driver CD to a folder on the drive where your Windows 98 resides while you're in XP.