I have a formatted 586 that I can't get to see drive?

Question

I did the formatting of drive C. It has 2 hard drives inside, >500meg C drive & 1.2 meg D? drive. Also 3.25 A drive and a CD rom.
I was in the BIOS and changed it to read A drive first instead of C.
I downloaded a OEM Win98 start up disk info off the net.
Yes now I have A drive and I can make it go to C drive. Other than that, nothing. I can't make it go to E drive to read the CD>or D drive either.....none of them exist, yet I see the light go on on the CD drive when I start the computer.
I must be missing something . It is an AMIBIOS.
Anybody willing to wade into this muck and give me a heads up? "Preciate the info"

Answer 1

It seems that you have repartitioned but not yet formatted your partitions. Try using while in boot floppy. Your floppy should have format.exe in it. Otherwise boot from the windows98 disk, to get into dos prompt , it will create a virtual drive from where you can run the format command
A:> format c:\
press enter

Answer 2

With the win98 boot disk you will not be able to "see" the CD drive unless generic CD driver are loaded when you boot to the A: drive.

Here's a couple things you could try...

Run Fdisk to check your partition status try "fdisk /status" you could also use "fdsik /mbr" to repair the master boot record it may be corrupted. Here's a site on fdisk commands http://www.computerhope.com/fdiskhlp.htm#01

You could also download the winME boot disk it comes with cd drivers so you should be able to access your CD drive.
http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Answer 3

Win98 needs a cd driver to read the CD. I use CDGOD to boot with. It has a CD driver for pretty much all cd brands. If in doubt, use the mutsumi driver. It is good for most all.

Answer 4

to read the cd you need to load the cdrom drivers in DOS...