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Can't find files on bootable cd

R

r9ohcop

n00b
Joined
Jun 24, 2005
Messages
36
I am trying to flash my BIOS with a bootable CD. I found a bootable ISO online and it works fine. I burned the ISO to a CD (using Magic ISO) and successfully boot from the disk.

However, on another disk I added my bios files to the bootable ISO (using Magic ISO again) and, although I can boot form this disk, I cannot find the bios files in DOS. I have tried "dir (filename)" and no entries are found.

If I load the same CD in windows explorer, I can see the bios files are on the disk (the bootable ISO files are not shown by windows explorer... as expected).

I have no idea why I can't find the same files when booting from the CD. I think maybe I didn't use Magic ISO maker correctly.

Has anyone else successfully created a boot disk, and could you please help me out.
 
It all depends on how your original ISO was set up.

CD's can boot in "emulation" mode. This means it basically mimics a DOS floppy disc, and it was very popular back in the day. The CD would boot up and you would get a 1.44MB "floppy" that held your DOS partition. You would then have to switch drives to get to the rest of your CD because you were limited to 1.44MB.

If this is the case, you should see the MSCDEX cdrom extensions loading during boot. It will tell you what drive letter the CD was mounted on. You'll need to change to this drive by typing the letter and a : like C: .

This is just a guess, though ---

On a side note, if you're trying to flash a motherboard BIOS, lots of motherboards don't even need a boot CD anymore. The last few that I have -- I could just copy the file to a flash drive or, or leave it somewhere on my Hard Drive. There was a special key during post you could hit to flash, as well as an option in the "save/exit" menu of the BIOS. You would either press the key or load it from the bios settings and it would boot to the flash utility. You can then browse to your BIOS file and flash it.
 
The ISO does contain mscdex.exe and I believe it is set up as a floppy emulator.

I read the ISO's readme and it says the bios files should be located under R:, but "cd r:\" says invalid drive specification. Is there some other command I should be trying? I'm not sure what you meant by a : like C:.

The motherboard's from 2002/2003 and, at least in bios, has no bootable usb. I might be able to flash from windows but the NIC does not work so... well I'll probably do that eventually if this does not work out.
 
Excuse me.
I understand what Demon10000 said. It's that the drive letter of the CD will be given on the screen when it is mounted on (when DOS is being loading), and you should use that letter as the parameter of the cd command.

if you can't see the information, you can try "dir a:", "dir b:", "dir c:", "dir d": and so on to see where is the BIOS file.
 
Ah, ok thanks for the help. I tried "cd b:\" all the way through "cd z:\" last night though with no success.

Will try dir now.
 
I tried "dir a:" through "dir z:" and did not find the files. I can still see the files in windows explorer though.

I tried another boot ISO (http://www.infocellar.com/CD/Boot-CD.htm) and again added the bios files in Magic ISO. After burning a CD again I can't find the bios files in DOS...

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?
 
Is your CD-ROM a SATA device? I remember that many older motherboards needed special driver for SATA devices to install Windows XP.
 
Sorry for delay. I do not have a program to actually explore the boot ISO so I don't know how to simply post those two files. Any suggestions?

The hard drive is actually ATA 133 (IDE). The boot ISO has 5 different drivers for different hard drive types. I've tried an IDE driver, a SATA driver and no driver. I'll try the other drivers tonight.
 
Testing your boot ISO on a virtual machine before burning it to a CD maybe will save some time and CD disks for you.

I got the content of those two files in the ISO (http://www.infocellar.com/CD/Boot-CD.htm) on a virtual machine:
autoexec.bat:
-----------------------------------
@echo off
MSCDEX.EXE /D:OEMCD001 /L:K
path=a:\;c:\;c:\windows;c:\windows\system32


config.sys:
-------------------------------------------------
DEVICE=\HIMEM.SYS


And with that ISO, I got the following screen output on the virtual machine:
-------------------------------------
Starting Windows 98...

Device driver not found: 'OEMCD001'
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
A:\>
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your help. I was just about to instal a virtual machine when I tried "Bart's way to create a bootable CD" (http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/) for the second time.

Bart's way worked perfectly this time (the first time around I tried his method in Vista and that didn't work. This time I tried in XP and that did work). I can see the files now in DOS.

Again, thanks. I'm still not sure why I couldn't find the files with the other ISO's. If you keep exploring the issue and find out why, let me know because I have 4 CDs sitting around that are useless.
 
I'm glad you got your issue fixed. For what it's worth:

Code: 
MSCDEX.EXE /D:OEMCD001 /L:K

That line will install the CD driver as K. Unfortunately, the CD Driver isn't being loaded in the config.sys so it will never work.
 
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