by Mike Loring
Ah, quite a few. And how many have made an Emergency Start Disk (ESD) like Windows 95 recommends? Not quite as many. Now the last question: How many have tested their Emergency Start Disk? I thought so, very few.
Some of you are wondering how to test the disk. It is easy. Just put the disk in drive A: and restart your computer. When the C: prompt comes up see if you can address all of your drives, i.e., CD, Zip Drive, or other special drives. If you can then you don’t need to read any further. You have a completely functional Emergency Start Disk (ESD). For those who could not address the special drives, this article is for you .
We will start with the statement that every computer owner needs an ESD for their system; whether it is the DOS 3.3 operating system or Windows 95, it doesn’t matter. If anything goes wrong with the boot-up files on your hard drive (CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC. BAT, SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, or the REGISTRY for Windows 95) you need something to get started with. Windows 95 helps you along by starting the ESD when you put an empty disk in drive A: at Windows 95 request. The problem is it doesn’t finish the job.
Windows 95 put the system files on the disk and such essential files as FDISK, FORMAT and EDIT plus their support files. These are a necessary beginning. What Windows 95 does not do is put copies of the files that run your special drives on the disk, and without those you cannot access your CD or Zip Disk or other goodies. So you, as a paranoid computer user, should put them there as well as copies of your CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files.
The usual question I get asked is “How do you do this?” If you open Windows Explorer or File Manager you can look at a tree diagram of your hard drive, starting with C:\. In Windows 95 you need to make sure you can see all the files and drives on the sys tem before you start looking for files to move. To do this, use the following steps:
1. Open Explorer.
2. Click View, Options in the window’s menu bar. The View Options dialog box sheet will then open.
3. Check “Show all files” and uncheck “Hide MS DOS file extensions” for file types that are registered.
4. Click OK. Now that you will be able to see all the files on your hard drives go to the root directory on C:\. You will find CONFIG.SYS andAUTOEXEC.BAT there. Put your ESD in drive A: now and highlight CONFIG.SYS and right click the file. This will br ing up a menu with Copy To...on it. Click on this and then on Drive A:, which will be one of the sub choices. This will copy CONFIG.SYS to your A: drive. Repeat the same procedure to copy AUTOEXEC.BAT to the A: drive. Now you are ready to start looking f or those drivers so you can access your special drives.
Using WORDPAD (or any TXT editor) open CONFIG.SYS on your A: drive. Read the lines very carefully, looking for a line that looks something like this: “DEVICEHIGH (or DEVICE)=3DC:\SOUND\SC400\DRIVERS\MTMCD AI.SYS - / P: 170.15 /D:MSCD000.” The actual driver is the .SYS file. From the “C:” to that name is the path to the driver. Everything after the .SYS are the parameters that make the driver work. The last part “/D:MSCD000” is the drive identification.
Using Explorer follow the path (in this case C: \SOUND\SC400\DRIVERS). Now copy the driver file (MTMCDAI.SYS) to your A: drive. The last step for this driver is to open CONFIG.SYS on your A: drive and change the reference from DEVICE HIGH=3DC:\SOUND\SC40 0\DRIVERS\MTMCDAI. SYS /P: 170,15 /D:MSCD000 to DEVICEHIGH= 3DA:MTMCDAI.SYS /P: 170,15 /D:MSCD000. This now references the copy you put on the A: drive.
It takes two drivers to make a CD drive work. The other driver is in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Using WORDPAD again open the copy of AUTOEXEC.BAT on your A: drive. Look for a line that looks something like this: “LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 /e /m:20.” Again everything from the “C:” to MSCDEX.EXE is the pat h. The file MSCDEX.EXE is what you want to copy to your A: drive. This file is the “Microsoft CD Extensions”, the addition to DOS that allows a CD to be read. You will also notice the drive identification is the same — /D:MSCD000. This has to be or the drive will not work.
Now copy the MSCDEX.EXE file to your A: drive just like you did the other files before. Your last step is to change the reference in AUTOEXEC. BAT on the A: drive from LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE / D: MSCD000 /e /m:20 to LH A:\MSCDEX. EXE / D:MSCD000 /e /m:20. Now you can shut down Windows 95 and restart your machine from the A: drive and have the machine recognize that you have a CD in the system. So when the ESD is needed to recover from a Win95 disaster you can reload Windows 95 without any more hair pullin g than you did when you first installed it.
You can follow the same procedures for any other drivers mentioned in your CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files that your computer needs to recognize special drives.
Reprint from Temecula Valley Computer User Group Newsletter , Temecula, CA.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.