[dlageose]

Greetings,

My name is David and I am a junior administrator at a not for profit organization. We recently received 25 laptops that were donated to us by MasterCard. I am trying to put XP professional on these laptops, but I cannot boot from the cdrom. The laptops are Dell Latitude 400's and the cdrom is a removable Dell cdrom module. The laptops show a Windows 95 startup and then go to a DOS prompt where I get an error that reads:

Device driver not found: 'MSCD001'.
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
c:\

I have tried many things but keep coming up short. Any idea of how to boot from the cdrom so I can setup XP? Thanks in advance

David Lageose

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well first of all are you sure those computers are up to running xp? Another concern is do you have licenses for all of them? as far as the prompt is sounds like it isn't loading the correct driver for the cd. being that it boots 95 it really has me concerned that it will not support xp.

[shard92]

well first of all are you sure those computers are up to running xp? Another concern is do you have licenses for all of them? as far as the prompt is sounds like it isn't loading the correct driver for the cd. being that it boots 95 it really has me concerned that it will not support xp.

[Tyger]

I have to agree with shard92, there is very little likelyhood that a computer designed for win 95 will support XP. Right click on My Computer to find out how much memory you have. Better yet install the Belarc Advisor in one of the machines and run it and post the report here as an attachment. You may be abale to upgrade to win98se, which is still a good OS/

[gtippery]

Device driver not found:  'MSCD001'.
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
c:\

This sounds like there might be a line in AUTOEXEC.BAT referring to MSCD001, and no corresponding line in CONFIG.SYS that loads it. If that's the case, try commenting out that line in AUTOEXEC.BAT, or just rename it to AUTOEXEC.OLD or something, as Win95 or later usually doesn't need any CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT, and is better off without them.

But by the time you see this message, it's already too late to boot from the CD -- you're already booting off the HD. Can you get into the CMOS/BIOS setup and change the boot order so the CD comes before the HD?

And I share another poster's concern about licenses. If you think MS will let you (as a nonprofit) have several machines running on the same copy of XP (and/or Office, etc.), you need to apply to them for a multiuser license. Otherwise buy legit copies, stick with W95, or switch to Linux, FreeBSD, or some other free OS. If you check the RAM size (most important), processor speed (less important) and disk space vs. the "suggested" (not "minimum") requirements of the various OSes, you may find you've narrowed down your choices.