First post, by x73rmin8r
I have an HP T5740 I'm running DOS 6.22 on that has BIOS level USB support where USB keyboards, mice (with ctmouse), floppy drives, and flash drives (formatted to FAT16, interpreted as second hard drive) "just work" in DOS. I'd like to get an external CD drive working, but am not having any success. The one I have is a Rioddas BT638.
How should I be thinking this problem through? I've read through some guides on getting USB CD drives to work in DOS, but they're for older systems where the USB interface needs to be set up in DOS as well. Should I assume that the USB part of the problem is being taken care of by the BIOS (and not try and load any DOS USB drivers) and just work on trying different DOS CD software? Are there differences in drives that make them either compatible or not with DOS?
I've tried Freedos that automatically loads in all the necessary CD drivers to get a normal IDE drive to work, and I think it has its own USB support as well, but it didn't recognize it. I would have thought that Freedos would have loaded some modern hyper-compatible CD driver and it'd be fine.
Anybody have any experience doing this or have any info you could point me toward about how to figure this out?
EDIT:
tried using Philscomputerlab's CD drivers VIDECDD.SYS, with DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\VIDECDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL and LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:OPTICAL in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. No Dice.