Greetings,

I recently rebuilt an old Gateway Pentium 166 MMX system. Attached is a quad speed CD-ROM drive. I have a 32GB CF card with Windows 98 on it and everything works perfectly. However, the CD-ROM isn't working correctly on my MS-DOS CF cards. I can boot from my Windows 98 SE CD just fine. However, whenever I try to DIR with a disc in the drive, it will sometimes display everything properly, but more often than not it will show only a few files or even garbled text. If it can show the full directory and allow me to type install.exe for example, it will start to load the file and then stop. The system isn't locked up as I can reboot via the keyboard, but it just stops loading the file from the CD and doesn't return to a prompt. Since everything works in Windows 98, and the drive worked on a previous build, I am assuming that there is a weird compatibility issue with DOS 7's mscdex. The problem is happening with VIDE-CDD.SYS and also with whatever driver the Windows 98 CD uses when used as a boot disc. I am trying to find alternate versions of mscdex to test out.

Has this issue happened to anyone before? Is there anything I can try? I had thought that maybe the ribbon cable was faulty and perhaps the drive was going bad until I tested everything to be working under Windows. Other than mscdex, I have no idea on what else to try. I do know that this motherboard is picky about certain SD-to-CF adapters as I have two of what looks like the same adapter, but they appear differently at boot time which indicates a different controller chip in the adapter. Whenever I use the "wrong" adapter with this board, I experience issues similar to the CD-ROM problem. However, I cannot blame the IDE ports since a different adapter always works to read a 128GB SD card, and like I said, the CD-ROM problem is happening only in MS-DOS.

I'm not sure if the attached pic is the same board, but they look very similar.

Many thanks for any information and advice!
Scythifuge