kaolinitedreams wrote on 2024-09-06, 00:45:

How do I get MSDOS to recognize the drive? Was there software available back in the day with the drivers? Would any old floppies have the drivers?

Guess you've never installed or initialized an optical drive under DOS before.

You have to add

1DEVICE=SBIDE.SYS /D:MSCD001

in your config.sys

And

1MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001

in your autoexec.bat

SBIDE.SYS can be found online; MSCDEX.EXE is included in MS-DOS.

These are the simplest syntax in respective files; you might have to add more parameters in order to customize settings for your build.

EDIT: I just realized your system was a 486DX2 so it had an independent IDE controller card rather than integrated into southbridge. I've never used an IDE CD-ROM on pre-Pentium builds (I used interface on sound cards, namely Panasonic / Creative interface) so there might be additional parameters under such circumstances. You might want to look for the manual of your CD-ROM model as well.

Supporting dormcat response, you can get how a cdrom drive is initialized from a Win98 boot floppy disk.

It normally uses a driver called OAKCDROM that gets calles from config.sys/autoexec.bat, I do not remember 100%.

If you copy this to a normal DOS installation it should work straightforward.

Re: Get CD-ROM running under MS-DOS

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-06, 01:32:

[...]

EDIT: I just realized your system was a 486DX2 so it had an independent IDE controller card rather than integrated into southbridge.

That's not a given, some late 486 chipsets had integrated IDE, and even where it's a separate chip, if it's onboard, it will have correct resources hard-wired and whatever BIOS support is available (not much on 486 usually) will be there. But IDE is IDE, regardless of where the controller is located. Same drives, drivers & syntax apply. Only difference is that the controller itself needs configuring if external to the motherboard (correct address & IRQ, usually using jumpers), but given it works under Windows 95 we can assume that to be correct.

I've never used an IDE CD-ROM on pre-Pentium builds (I used interface on sound cards, namely Panasonic / Creative interface) so there might be additional parameters under such circumstances. You might want to look for the manual of your CD-ROM model as well.

Given that it's a 24x drive, it's highly unlikely to be an old proprietary one. 90% chance it's plain ATAPI/IDE, in which case your instructions are fully valid, 10% chance it's SCSI, in which case some differente (usually ASPI) drivers will be needed.

OP, as you can see lack of information leads to unnecessary confusion. Be sure to always mention exact brand+model of stuff when asking questions. In that case we could give you an accurate answer straight away.

dionb wrote on 2024-09-06, 11:51:

Given that it's a 24x drive, it's highly unlikely to be an old proprietary one. 90% chance it's plain ATAPI/IDE, in which case your instructions are fully valid, 10% chance it's SCSI, in which case some differente (usually ASPI) drivers will be needed.

Yup, given its speed and problem-free under Win95 I assumed it an ATAPI/IDE drive. The lower prices and easier setup procedures of ATAPI/IDE CD-ROMs made them extremely popular in post-Win95/Pentium consumer markets, leaving SCSI drives only in hands of professionals (required highest performance and stability with SCSI environment already established) and Mac users.

BTW I wonder which model was the fastest proprietary CD-ROM? IIRC Panasonic/Creative CR-562/563 were once extremely popular 2x (300 KB/s) CD-ROMs but they were soon to be replaced by 4x ATAPI/IDE models such as NEC CDR-273.