First post, by Brutus814
Hello gurus at Vogons! I have posted twice before to this site with questions to my 486 build and both times the great people of this community have come through and helped me fix my problem. As a refresher, I have built a 486 DX2-66 system for retro gaming. I was able to get everything up and running perfectly. I have been enjoying my system for past several months but thought I would do a bit of tinkering. I dislike having to transfer files from my modern computer to the 486 via floppy/CD-ROM. I decided to add a compact flash drive to my setup. I would like to keep my HDD for DOS (and eventually Windows) and would like the CF drive to store games/programs. I added the CF interface as a slave device to my VLB controller card with my HDD as the master. My BIOS recognized the card I have as 8GB and I was able to successfully partition the 8 GB card and divide it into 4 drives (D, E, F and G). Things worked well without problems. The problem I then ran into was that I would also like to keep my CD-ROM drive installed to play games that come on CD. I bought an ISA controller card (IODE-3292U) and installed it. I have disabled all of the ports on the card except the IDE interface via jumpers. I connected the CD-ROM drive (which was previously working fine as a slave to the HDD on the VLB controller card). There is an option on the card for the IDE address to be 1F0H or 170h on the jumpers. The computer will not find the CD-ROM unless the jumper is set to 170h and the CD drive is set to slave. When I do this, I can successfully install the driver CR_ATAPI.SYS (which is from the manufacturer). However, when the computer reboots, while it is trying to load the driver from the config.sys, it will find the CD drive and then will state it is installing the driver, then the computer will freeze. If I take the load driver line out of the config.sys, the computer will boot just fine to DOS without the CD-ROM. I have tried different drivers (OAKCDROM and GSCDROM) without success. These drivers can't even find the CD-ROM drive. So, I am wondering, is it possible to have a HDD and CF on one IDE interface and a CD-ROM on a separate interface/card? Should I just save myself the headache and get rid of the HDD and just use the CF with the CD drive as a slave? I feel like it should work with the three drives since it can find the CD-ROM but that there may be a conflict somwhere? I have listed my specs below for reference. Thank you everyone again in advance!
a Chicony CH-471a Rev 3.0 VLB motherboard
Intel 486 DX2-66 (SX955) processor
Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB graphics card
Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 sound card
2x36 (8MB) FPM Parity 70NS 72-pin SIMM x2 memory modules
ISSI IS61C1024-15N 128k x 8 High Speed CMOS Static RAM x4 for 512 KB of L2 cache
ISSI IS61C256AH-15N 32k x 8 Static RAM x1 for TAG SRAM for L2 cache
Imation 3.5" internal floppy drive
Chinon 5.25" internal floppy drive
Western Digital Caviar 420 MB 3.5" IDE hard drive
HP Panasonic CR-583-B 8x IDE CD-ROM drive
Tyan S1345 VL400GW-VI VLB IDE/Multi-IO controller card
IODE-3292U HDD/Floppy ISA controller card
Bestec BPS-2994-4U AT 350W power supply
Microsoft serial PS/2 compatible mouse
IBM Model M keyboard