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Optical drive in a Packard Bell PB 610

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First post, by jaevans

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Greetings all,

I've restored an old PB 610, added ram, replaced the bad 3.5 inch floppy drive, installed win95 (I still have the set of 13 floppy disks), and now would like to get a CD-ROM drive working in it. It doesn't look like the BIOS supports this but I've seen photos online of PB610's with optical drives. It has Phoenix BIOS V1.00 and trying different settings for the 2nd hard drive has no impact.

Any recommendations? It may be that the IDE CD drive I have is too new. I may try to snag an old creative drive and try it but thought I'd check here first.

Thanks,
John - Colorado Springs, CO

Reply 1 of 2, by dionb

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ATAPI CDRoms don't need BIOS support (unless you want to boot off them), just set BIOS to 'none' for the channel & device in question, then use the relevant drivers in DOS (eg. oakcdrom.sys) and the relevant TSR (eg. mscdex.exe). I'd expect Windows 95 to detect & be able to use the drive automatically.

If the drive isn't showing up with those two, I'd check jumpers first & foremost. If you are giving it a controller (i.e. the secondary) to itself, jumper it to Master. If you are sharing a controller, you usually want to set the CDRom to Slave. Don't forget quite a few HDDs have different settings for "Single Drive" and "Master with Slave" - so in that case you might also need to change the HDD jumpering.

Reply 2 of 2, by jaevans

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Thanks Dionb,

Yep, figured this out after my post. Installing the drive was an afterthought once I installed win95 so I didn't tell it to install the drivers, but now that I know what to do, I can fix this. Funny how I've forgotten all these nuances from two decades ago.

John

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