Greetings,

I found a replacement Tomato 4DPS board, purchased from a really cool Russian individual who I wish I could have a beer with. SO far so good, except that it seems to have stability issues with optical drives (I also had to swap IDE cables until I found one that worked in order to detect and use CF cards in an IDE/CF adapter;) specifically an NEC CDR-273 quad speed drive that I hunted down for max DOS game compatibility. Slaved is a Teac DVD-ROM drive. The 4DPS never lists optical drives as being detected, either in the bios or during the boot process (when the window pops up with the box listing drives, ports, etc.) However, the drive driver and mscdex does assign a drive letter. When I try to access a CD (using a Microsoft Intellipoint 3.0 driver CD for testing,) I either get an abort, retry, fail error OR an error that reads something like: CDR 103 Error: Not of High Sierra Format or ISO 9960 Format. The CDR-273 works just fine in my Ultimate P3 Retro build.

Also, when using just the DVD-ROM drive, when I use the dir command to read the contents of a CD, I get a switch error, though it then displays the CD directory/files. The driver I am using is qcdrom.sys (DEVICEHIGH /L:1,4096 =D:\DRIVERS\CDROM\QCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001)

Any ideas? I am hoping to rectify this situation and to be able to have a quad speed as the main optical drive in this 486 box! Also, the bios chip on this is one of those UV light chips with bios version 1.5. Is it worth trying to find a chip or a bios flashing service to put the 1.72 bios (I think that is the version) on this board?

Thank you!
Scythifuge