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NEC CDR-273 rebooting in a loop when disc is inserted

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First post, by Scythifuge

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Greetings,

I was struggling to get an NEC CDR-273 quad speed to work in a Tomato 4DPS board with a slaved Teac DVD-ROM, explained in this thread:

4DPS replaced, but of course there are woes

I finally got them both to load with VIDE-CDD.SYS, simply after trying a longer cable. There doesn't seem to be any other explanation. I did find a thread I made back in 2016 where I had similar issues trying to get two drives to operate, though I forgot about it as that was before my accident (and when I had an easier time with such projects!) I used the same CF cards with the same files that I had when I solved that issue, so it is strange that I experienced the issue again, albeit with a different solution.

However (of course...)

Whenever I put a disc in the NEC, the computer reboots as soon as the door closes after the tray slides back into the drive. If I leave the disc in the drive, the mobo will post with a beep, and then reboot - over and over and over. If I open the door while booting, it will complete the boot process. I love this Tomato board (it has been my favorite socket 3 board due to PS/2 mouse support and PCI slots,) and spent a year or two hunting down a replacement. I have seen the CDR-273 mentioned in other threads on Vogons as a good choice, and I would love to have a quad speed drive for compatibility with certain games.

What I really need is to figure out how to get the 1.72f bios on a chip that is compatible with this board...

I got this drive to work as a lone secondary master. What could be causing the drive to reboot as soon as the tray closes with a disc inside? This is a new one for me...

Scythifuge

EDIT: I swapped the drive out with another driver as the master and kept the DVD as a slave, and the rebooting persists.

Reply 1 of 3, by Scythifuge

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I am diagnosing it as a PSU issue. I swapped the PSU out for a Corsair AX860i, and I can now use both the quad speed and the cd-rw I currently have in there, soii now I will put the DVD-ROM back in there. When typing dir and pressing enter, I am still getting:

Invalid Switch - /4
(Error occurred in environment variable)

The drive will display the directory contents, however. Though perhaps it is due to using FAT32 with Windows 95, as I also get a winver error during boot. I don't know what else it could be.

Reply 2 of 3, by BitWrangler

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Hmmm if it's a Win98 system disk, with command com etc from win98 to support fat32, you probably want to be using win98 MSCDEX as well as other dos utils.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 3 of 3, by Scythifuge

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BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-19, 01:48:

Hmmm if it's a Win98 system disk, with command com etc from win98 to support fat32, you probably want to be using win98 MSCDEX as well as other dos utils.

I tried multiple discs, including Crusader: No Remorse. A google search brought me to a forum where someone was having a similar issue on a more modern PC, and they felt it was a PSU issue. I am having bad luck with PSUs as of late: that NOS Antec dying, a Dell PSU not working and giving an audible "whine" when plugged in, and now this PSU which "works," but apparently can't handle the power spike from an optical drive in a dual drive setup when it does whatever they do when the tray closes with a disk inserted.

I built this 486 in a beige/off-white horizontal desktop case for that old school look, and it has been stressful - the 4DPS can be very sensitive, won't work with a lot of RAM sticks I have on hand (though I got lucky with a 16mb stick - hoping to upgrade for the best WFW 3.11 experience, hehehe,) the power jack on my dual CF/IDE 3.5 bay reader is touchy and I had to bend the pins in order to maintain power, the 5.25 floppy drive that matches the case color doesn't work and I don't know how to diagnose and fix them, so a grey-green drive has to go in, and of course the drives/PSU issue. It looks like everything is working now, so I am going to screw the drives in and pout the lid on it and start using it. I have two 4gb CF cards, but I found out that I can use 8gb drives, so I am looking for two 8gb CF cards. Then I will tweak my startup files. Right now I am getting 621k, though my AWE32 isn't in there yet, so I have to see what it will be after I put it in there.

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