Very brief, and I'm really NO expert at all, but when you get to the a: prompt, are you able to switch to d:? And then, there's a command to show you all the files on that drive, I've forgotten it, but I used to use it a lot before windows. Then you could see if the file is on the drive/CD?

What happens when you insert the windows system disk into the computer? Does it not start-up automatically? What exactly is the problem, like, why are you trying to boot from the CD drive? I've only had to do that in one extreme case, when I absolutely could not get into the computer at all. All other times,I've just had to insert the CD and it starts up automatically, from which I can choose to format.

Can you give more detail?

> To load Windows again after a format, having
> chosen boot from a floppy, with CD-ROM
> support. That all worked fine, but when I
> get the A:\> prompt then what do I type.
> My CD-ROM is drive D. This is for my wife’s
> computer and she has Windows 98se. I have
> tried D:\WIN98, D:\EXE, D:\RUN, but none of
> them worked.