[plock]

Hello-After formatting the hardrive on an older Gateway pc, I can get only a c prompt. Although the bootup screen shows the Toshiba cd rom as installed, the bios says that it is not installed??
Also, on bootup, the screen prompts me for the location of the command interpreter: it says command.com missing or corrupted.
There was already a command.com on the main directory c: but also a command.com in the dos directory, so I type c:\dos\command.com at this prompt and it works - but I shouldn't have to do that. Help please.

[Rockn]

If you format and sys a drive there is going to be nothing on it but the minimum system files to process DOS commands. Just because there is physically a CD-ROM in the PC does not mean that the OS can access it without some sort of driver support. sounds like your path statement needs to be modified to read C:\dos at the command prompt type "set path=C:\DOS"

[plock]

Rockn - ok, I set path to dos at the c promt and rebooted-it still does not recognize any drives other than a and c and shows the same in the bios. All the orginal drivers [sys] are in the dos directory.

[Rockn]

You need the DOS based drivers for your CD-ROM loading from the autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

[AcaCandy]

What operating system are you going to be installing?

Why don't you just copy your boot disk to the c: drive? Are you working with a boot disk that has cdrom support?

Also, I just noticed you said the cdrom isn't appearing in bios either, have you checked your connections? Is it on the same IDE as the hard drive? If it's by itself, is there an option in the bios setup to enable the secondary IDE controller?