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Adding a cdrom drive to an old PC

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First post, by mrgreen

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Hello,
does the controller embedded on wearnes-pb3905 (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/wearnes-pb3905) motherboard support CD burners (no need of burning features but only reading CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW)?

I would like to add a CDROM drive to this 386 motherboard but (after installing OAK Driver) the device is not found. I connected on the same IDE cable of the hard drive (which is jumperless, about 80 MB size).
I tried to put either slave jumper or no jumper on CD burner drive as well but nothing...

Do I need an external IDE controller that supports ATAPI (or whatever standard that makes the CD burner works)?

My first PC had Windows 98 os.

Reply 2 of 8, by VivienM

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How old is this motherboard? ATAPI first started to be a thing in late 1994ish, I think - before then, the most common way of connecting a CD-ROM (e.g. the way all those 'multimedia kits' did it) was using a proprietary interface on your sound card...

Reply 3 of 8, by rasz_pl

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I dont think there is such a thing as jumperless HDD unless you mean cable select, and afaik that one will need compatible IDE cable.
master/slave was problematic for more than obvious reason https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-dual-drive-ide-hell/

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-02, 12:22:

How old is this motherboard? ATAPI first started to be a thing in late 1994ish, I think - before then, the most common way of connecting a CD-ROM (e.g. the way all those 'multimedia kits' did it) was using a proprietary interface on your sound card...

ATAPI wouldnt matter, its layer above. IDE CD drive IDE implementation tho would and Its possible early drives didnt know how to work as secondary on same cable.

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 4 of 8, by mrgreen

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I found the jumper on the bottom of the hard drive.
The C/D pins are already jumpered (shorted) and this means "SINGLE DRIVE" or "PRIMARY DRIVE". So the CD burner should be the slave (secondary drive). But this setting I already tried unsuccessfully.
Ref: https://www.computerhope.com/hdd/hdd0047.htm
I also noticed that my disk has no CAM pins but only E1 and C/D.

My first PC had Windows 98 os.

Reply 6 of 8, by Horun

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Yes am thinking that it (HD) cannot master that new of a cdrom if any ide cdrom. Have seen similar issues before (and probably one of the reasons nearly all sound cards of same era <1993 based on chipset dates> have a cdrom interface of some type)
Added: not mention that newer IDE cdroms are ATAPI spec, that spec came out late 94 or 1995, so a HD from around 1992-93 would not be built to properly communicate with it as a master/slave...as VivienM mentioned and afaik

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 7 of 8, by mrgreen

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I tried to invert: I put CD burner as master and the drive as slave but the situation is worst, no boot is possible from hard drive.
I'm going to try putting a compact flash adapter instead of the HD.

My first PC had Windows 98 os.

Reply 8 of 8, by jmarsh

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A compact flash adapter is even less likely to work, most of the time they're wired to be the only drive on the cable / don't have the required signal connected (PDIAG) for proper master/slave operation.

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