major hardware snag with a clean install

Okay, this is only for us old folks who remember DOS. Last week, I inherited a Packard Bell Legend 105CD, a venerable old relic, clean as a whistle, working smoothly with its P-1, 90 MHz, 8 mb resident ram, 540 mb Conner HDD. (even came with a laser printer, nice monitor, speakers, etc.) I regularly use a DOS-based program in the work I do, so I was kind of pleased to have a machine I could simply dedicate to that work, with no other expectations of it.

The machine had Windows 3.11 on it, it was double spaced, with not much memory left on the hard drive. I wanted to do an upgrade from 3.11 to 98se, but the upgrade disc stopped after doing the system inventory and told me it couldn’t put 98 on a machine with 8 mb memory. I actually had a couple 32mb SIMM sticks of old EDO Ram, snapped them in, and the bios run counted up 72 mbs ram. I was so pleased. Unfortunately I wasn’t too sure about the decompress, and I wasn’t comfortable about how to unmount the I: drive, so I thought hey! start over clean. I fdisked, and then formatted C: ...

BAD MISTAKE.

when I was all finished, there was no CDRom to be recognized, the OAK Technology MSCD001 driver from the startup floppy boot disk would not load. the HDD is plugged into an IDE slot on the mobo, but the CD Rom is plugged into an IDE slot on the sound card "“ probably why the virtual DOS ram drive couldn’t find it.

The windows startup disk help section warns under "known issues" that CD Rom drives connected to sound cards may not work properly. The startup disk offers 5 other CD Rom drivers for ATAPI and SCSSI CDRoms, and suggests that for proprietary CDRoms, the user should contact the computer manufacturer. I posted with PB, but no one has come forth yet with a real suggestion. Even if I had a model specific driver, I can’t figure out how to path it to the CDRom device on the sound card. The sound card isn't on a drive.

I thought about plugging the CD Rom into the secondary IDE slot to see if that would make the temporary DOS drive recognize it; however when I looked at the mobo photo, it appears that there is no secondary IDE. The secondary slot is identified as an ISA cable slot. Don't know if this will work as a substitute IDE.

Or I could substitute another IDE cable to the hard drive which has a second plug on it, so that I can make the CDRom a slave to the HDD. That seems like a possibility. Or I could reload 3.11 with diskettes, but I still don’t have a way to path that CDRom driver to a sound card.

Before I take off with hardware experiments, I’m tapping here in to see if anyone else has run into this problem before and what worked for them. Has anyone ever installed a CDRom driver in DOS, to a SCSSI or ATAPI location other than the moboard? I have this sweet old machine that is perfect for my special needs, but I can’t load windows without a CD Rom.

Any similar war stories are welcome!

- maureen

 

Maureen,

I know your frustration - the early CD-ROM soundcard combos are almost all proprietary and can be a real bear to reinstall as you have found out.

First, even though that CD-ROM has a 40 pin connection it is not an IDE device so it will not work if you hook it up as master, slave whatever to any IDE controller.

It must be hooked to the soundcard to function. Not sure where you posted your question but in the past I have used www.priorityonesupport.com for packard bell drivers. It is free, but they require you to register, nothing more than name and email is required.

On their website there is a section on the left side that allows you to look information up by serial number of the computer.

They also have drivers listed by category. Your best chance of a driver is probably in the CDROM section. Most of them refer to the CDRom drive manufacturer - so any information you can get from your any labels on the CDROM itself may help. The exe files will create floppies that will let you install the drivers for the CDROM.

When/If you find the right drivers they will enable CDROM support in DOS which will let you load Windows from a CD. Hope this gives you a little help.

Cheers,

ICE

 

Hi Ice. "Real bear" is right. Interestingly, I was able to load windows from DOS, but now I have another problem: getting the OS to recognize this device.

Here’s what did work (sort of): I removed the two-connection 40-pin IDE cable that was in the machine, one end to the mobo, the other end to the HDD. I replaced it with a 40 pin IDE cable with three connections (a connection plug in the center, besides one on each end) . First, I connected the HDD to the mobo, booted to A: with no CDRom support, booted just fine to the A: prompt. Then I found a spare CD Rom drive, changed the jumpers to "slave" configuration, and plugged it into the third connection on the IDE cable, as a slave to the hard drive. Booted right to A: and loaded up the CDRom device with MSCD001. CD Rom worked fine, and loaded Windows without a hitch.

Like you said, the PBell CDRom is not an IDE device. I tried the above process with the PBell CDRom drive, it refused to be a slave "“ DOS would not recognize it no matter where I put the jumpers. I also tried plugging it into the ISA socket (not slot) on the mobo "“ (looks like an IDE socket). But, as you predicted, neither of those efforts produced any results.

Once Windows loaded from the DOS-driven spare CDRom, the sound and video worked surprisingly well for such an old machine, with just windows drivers. I was so pleased after the severe graphic limitations of the previous OS, Win 3.11. And of course the extra 64 mbs of ram added to the 8, makes it passable for what I want to use it for.

However, now that Windows is running solo, it cannot read from the CDRom "“ Explorer sees it, device manager sees it "“ even says that the device is working properly and no drivers are loaded or required for it. But Windows cannot use it -- I think it’s looking to the bios for the device. The Bios gives no recognition to it as a primary slave. Both Config.sys and Autoexec.bat are entirely empty. Was thinking that if I could flash the bios to update it a little and get it to recognize the new CDRom, that Windows would be able to read it. But I learned from another post, that there wasn’t a good chance of updating that old of a bios to a level of recognizing a CDRom as an IDE device.

I had pretty much given up on the idea of keeping the original CDRom, was planning to replace it with the working spare drive. I'll check around on the priorityonesupport website, that does give me another alternative.

But if I do replace PBell CDRom with the spare one that is working as a slave on the IDE cable, I still have to figure out how to identify the device and load a driver in Windows, not DOS. That's where I've been stuck right now.

I copied the driver MSDEX.EXE for MSCD001 from the virtual ram drive that the A: boot disk created, and put it in a folder on C: But I have nothing written to call up the driver and load the device into windows when the system boots. I have been searching around for some CDRom device setting strings and driver loading strings for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, so that I can adapt it to this machine, to make windows load a driver for my spare CDRom. This has been the real challenge. If anybody has any suggestions "“ Hey! I’m listening…

- maureen

 

Well, it’s working in Windows now "“ the substitute IDE CDRom, that is. I did some research and discovered that the device driver, MSCDEX.EXE and the sys file, OAKROMCD.SYS, are both loaded with Windows when Windows installs itself. Windows’ generic driver for the CDRom, MSCDEX, is located in the Windows\Command directory; the sys file for the CDRom, OAKROMCD.SYS, is located in the EBD directory under Windows\Command. So it was a matter of finding a correct string for each of the two startup bat files, and path those strings to the appropriate device enablers. Here is what worked for me:

for Autoexec.bat:
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001

for Config.sys:
Device=C:\WIINDOWS\COMMAND\EBD\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001

couple notes: single space between the file names and the /D…
you can call the D: drive MSCD001 or CDR01 or CDROM or whatever, but make sure the identification is the same in both the autoexec.bat and the config.sys

You can also rename the drive for the CDRom in the autoexec.bat string from D: to S: or R: or whatever. I have not used it, but if anyone is interested, here are the instructions:

/Lletter) sets the drive letter for the CDRom. so for your auto exec bat to change the letter to X, for example, the string would read this way:
…MSCDEX.EXE /L:X /D:MSCD001

One other note: Patch cord from old Cdrom to sound card does not fit new cdrom patch cord slot. Standard patch cord (I have at least 15) does not fit any connection on sound card. So sound card is definitely obsoltete for me "“ I can hear windows event sounds, but cannot play music from CDs.

Maybe, someday I'll decide to substitute an old ISA sound card and dump this problem. Right now, I'm just glad I have my CDRom back so I can load some of my apps & utilities into windows.

Thanks all for listening in. cheers!

-maureen