You'll need a driver.

DOS driver most likely.

OK, thanks - I have now got a suitable-looking driver from driverguide. It's only a DOS driver, here's what happens. I am running Win95 on this laptop.

- the line the driver puts in config.sys contains a lot of switches which stop the driver loading [as in, if I take them out the mscdex line in autoexec finds the CD drive]. Though this means the drive letter I specify is ignored.

- Win95 now reports a D: drive but cannot read CDROMs, saying the CD ROM is not IS9660 or High Sierra format.

- If I press F8 on startup and go to Command Prompt Only, then DOS sees the CD as drive D: and can read it. Only it cannot see the E: and F: partitions on my hard drive.

The command prompt mode is still Win95 [albeit the built-in DOS] of course.

Is there any way to either get Win95 to pick up the drive using the DOS drivers? Or is there a way to get DOS to recognise the additional partitions on the hard drive?

Suspect the answer is NO in each case, but maybe someone knows better!

Having the CD available in DOS is a step forward however, so many thanks for advice so far.

What did you use to create the extra partitions? What filesystem are the partitions?

I can't remember, but I probably used Win95 fdisk.

The hard disk is 6gb, set up as:

primary FAT partition = C drive

extended partition with a couple of FAT partitions/drives within that [and a few others for linux]

In "command only mode", fdisk sees the primary partition and the extended. but does not give an option to view information on drives in the extended partition [unlike Win98, which I am more used to - which is probably why I was surprised by all this].

I suppose the issue is whether DOS can be made to see drives on extended partitions or not. Loath to reformat [because I don't want to lose linux and I can't recall how I got it on there without a CD drive, except it was a lot of hassle!]. But I do have a spare hard drive I could experiment with [on this model the hard drive sleds slide in and out easily - no unscrewing or anything, just pull].

Do you have a LASTDRIVE=Z line in your CONFIG.SYS?

(Might not help much, but it's worth a try.)

Well, that may have been worth trying but the windows drivers are no longer an issue.

I managed to force a molex connector the wrong way round into another CD drive today [I thought this was a stiff one, ha ha ha], which immediately blew it. Mmm, nice smell...

So out of interest [aka desparation] I took the parallel port CD drive apart. It was a rebranded Matsushita [think that was the name] inside. Could not get it to work plugging it directly into my desktop motherboard IDE slots, but it comes up fine in Windows 98 when plugged into the interface on my Sound Pro 2 [and doing a hardware search].

So, the original problem that Windows 95 could not access the drive when inside the parallel case must have been there was no Windows driver for the parallel port interface card within the external drive. Windows reported a D:drive with a CD symbol [so I doubt lastdrive was an issue, though who am I to say], but always reported it empty and on refresh [which caused the CD light to come on - so something was happening] gave a message like "drive not ready".