Hello,

I'm working on a friend's computer, and now I'm stumped. It's a Hewlett Packard
Pavillion 7270 running at 166 mhz. It was tossing an error message "While
initializing device IOS, windows protection error, you need to restart your
computer", and it would then have to be started in safe mode.

I researched the error on the Microsoft Knowledge base and checked for all of
the things they said it could be with no luck, so I decided to do a re-install
of Windows 95 on her computer to eliminate the corrupted device driver [since I
didn't know which one it was].

I made a boot floppy for the computer, and rebooted with it after removing the
Program Files folder and when it booted to dos I deleted the .dat files in the
windows folder then ran the install for Windows 95 from the cd rom.

This all worked just fine untill Windows 95 did it's first restart. For some
reason when it restarted it couldn't find the cd rom drive anymore! This kept it
from installing the driver files for a bunch of stuff and generally created a
mess.

Sooooo, I thought, why not reboot from the floppy again, make a directory on the
hard drive and copy the Win95 folder on the install cd to the hard drive? Guess
again, now the cd rom can't be found when I boot off the floppy disk that I used
for the install process which worked just fine before! It says "CD Rom not
found" upon trying to load the cd rom driver in the config.sys.

I opened the case and made sure the cd rom drive was plugged in good and tight,
and checked the cmos setting to see if there was anything wrong there, but no
luck there either.

Got any idea why the cd rom drive should suddenly be unfindable even with the
dos drivers?

Thanks for any help you can be.

Ray Parrish

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