CD-ROM in DOS Installation

[thompsonth]

I am having a hoot trying to install a CD-ROM in DOS with a 486 machine. I have tried and retried until I am blue in the fact. I even went out and purchased a new CD-ROM to no avail. I am getting one of those (A)bort or (R)etry messages. Pressing Retry does no good. Upon aborting, I get a message reading "No drives found, aborting installation." I checked the driver and it is there, I checked the location of MSCDEX.EXE and it is there, and I checked the autoexec and config files and they seem to be correct. The cables are placed correctly. This was occurring with the old CD drive as well as the new one. Please help as I have run out of things that I know to try. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[Shag]

UUUUMMMMMM......have you done anything with your sound card lately? A lot of the old cd-rom's connected thru the sound card. Possibly your 486 is not actually IDE.

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Life is a "Terminal Condition"


[This message has been edited by Shag (edited 12-26-99).]

[thompsonth]

I am positive that the computer is IDE. I just removed the data cable from the sound card and CD-ROM and attempted a master/slave configuration with the data cable that is attached to my hard drive. I am not familiar with configurations of this type. Does this normally work? Thanks again.

[Eeyore]

The master/Slave is the Jumpers on each unit. Since they are hooke to the asme cable, the jumpers tell each which channel to use. The hard drive may have information on its tag. The choices are usually Single, Master or Slave. The CDROM will have the same choices. There may also be a Cable-Select choice. This is rarely used.
As to the IDE, it is not the computer that is of concern. There are SCSI CDROMS, UDE CDROMS and BUS CDROMS. If your CDROM was meant to connect using the sound card, it will not work on the IDE. The drivers for that type drive are different as they must configure the card.
For the Packard Bells, the CDROM drivers are usually CR_ATAPI.SYS or the like. But I have a 486 75mhz, and with a different CDROM than oem I had to use AOATAPI.SYS. And I cannot get Windows 95 to recognize it. So it remains DOS loaded.
Hope some of this helps.
Dennis

[thompsonth]

I ditched my old CD-ROM, which was connected through the sound card. I bought an IDE CD-ROM and I am attempting to connect it through the IDE channel (as a slave to the hard drive). Do I need to configure my BIOS to accomodate the CD-ROM? If not, then I am at a loss, because I have tried everything that I know to try. By the way, I have an older hard drive (Seagate ST3550A, 450 MB)on a Dell Dimension XPS 466V.

Thanks
Thomas

[Eeyore]

Iooked back at you first post and you said the driver is there. In the config.sys on the line that loads the driver there should be a /D:xxxxxxxx . I'm not sure if you are saying the file exists or that you saw the driver load.
If you Press F8 during boot when/or before it says "Starting" "Windows" or "MS DOS", maybe Shift and F8, You will be able to load the drivers one step at a time. The cdrom driver will either suceed or fail when you select it. If it succeeds, then it should exist in memory. Type MEM /C/P and look for the driver. That /D:xxxx is a name and the exact same words and/or numbers should be after MSCDEX.
Check here for more details:
http://citizens.reagan.com/internet/...ages/cdrom.htm
Dennis

[thompsonth]

I finally gave up and purchased a used hard drive and it was working at first. I almost had Linux installed and then....poof. It started all over again. Now, I have three hard drives sitting on my desk and can't get any of them to work. I am starting to think that it may be my motherboard/BIOS. I may go purchase one and see. Hmmmmm.

[Eeyore]

Looking at your last post, I agree that the mother board may be the culprit. A relative got the Chernobyl virus. So I have been reading about it. It can modify the BIOS and Damage drives after that. I don't know if it could do that to a 486, as I don't think older BIOS chips could be flash updated.
By elimination, you have had 2 different CDROMs and apparently more than one hard drive in the system. The only common device it the motherboard and the component hooked to it.
I can only wish you luck, as I'm baffled by this also.
Dennis

[thompsonth]

Thanks for your help nonetheless. I know alot more about software than hardware configurations and I thank you for your time.