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98 Boot disk changing RamDisk letter?

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First post, by mashrien

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Building an older system and my HDD is detecting as C: via the bios/post, but it's not yet been formatted, so it's not a valid drive or something. (It's weird)

When booting with my 98se w/ cdrom bootdisk, it's creating a ramdisk (which is fine) but it's taking drive letter C. I've tried everything I can think of as far as editing 'config.sys', 'autoexec.bat' and 'setramd.bat' but no matter what I do, it's still powering-through and stomping that C letter.

Is there any way to force it to select a different letter, or is there a better ramdisk utility that'll run on old 486's?

Reply 1 of 2, by konc

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Don't worry about it, just go on and partition/format/make your HDD bootable the normal way.
Once you remove the floppy and boot from it, it'll be c: again

Reply 2 of 2, by mashrien

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Turns out that was just part of the problem.. FDisk wouldn't "stick" after restarting, so I started disabling crap in the bios- 32Bit, LBA, Block Mode.. Now it's sticking. Then I just went ahead and re-wrote autoexec.bat and setramd.bat, and replaced ramdisk.sys with xmsdsk.exe.

Everything's working now. Though, for anyone else that ever googles and finds this- XMSDSK (replacement for MacroHard's ramdisk driver) is available here: https://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22443

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