wholover wrote on 2024-07-29, 17:25:

As for the main meat of this post, I'd like to put a CD drive in my PC, but I have no clue where to start. I tried to connect an IDE CD drive to my motherboard's secondary IDE port via the "master" connector of the IDE cable, but other than some CD spinning (possibly just due to power being delivered to the drive), nothing happened, as my PC ended up hanging between initializing the hardware and loading Win95. I've decided to use the CD drive ports on my CT3780 to connect to a CD drive, but I have no idea what drives are compatible with it. It seems to have proprietary connectors for Panasonic/Creative drives, Mitsumi Drives, and Sony drives, so I don't dare connect any standard IDE drive to that without further research and advice.

You are complete correct: You can't connect an IDE CD drive to that sound card. Alas, the only CD drives that you can get today at a reasonable price are IDE CD drives. Your card would support all common types of non-IDE drives, but even if you can obtain one of them, it would be a drive that was already outdated and considered slow when the Pentium 133 was modern. There is nothing special about the CT3780 card: All drives that are compatible with Sony interface cards, all drives that are compatible with Panasonic interface cards and all drives that are compatible with Mitsumi interface cards will work with your CT3780. Be aware that most (if not all) of the listed companies produced IDE drives later on. If you get a drive that is 6x speed or higher, the drive will very likely be an IDE drive. The "Creative" on that card refers to Panasonic drives rebranded by Creative Labs, again not to more modern IDE drives made by Creative.

I strongly suggest you troubleshoot the IDE interface on your mainboard, or how you connected the CD drive do that port instead of trying to get a drive that can be connected to the CT3780 card.

wholover wrote on 2024-07-29, 17:25:

I tried to connect an IDE CD drive to my motherboard's secondary IDE port via the "master" connector of the IDE cable, but other than some CD spinning (possibly just due to power being delivered to the drive), nothing happened, as my PC ended up hanging between initializing the hardware and loading Win95.

mkarcher wrote on 2024-07-29, 18:37:

I strongly suggest you troubleshoot the IDE interface on your mainboard, or how you connected the CD drive do that port instead of trying to get a drive that can be connected to the CT3780 card.

I fully agree with mkarcher here.

In principle, you should be able to connect an IDE drive to an IDE interface. I have connected a DVD-Rom to a 16bit ISA-IO in a 486 and it worked. But to not complicate things further, lets keep win95 out of the equation. Get the drive to be recognized by the machines bios. You want to see some written statement on the screen that it was detected.

As we don't know anything about how you connected and set things up, give us the details to what you have hooked up and how.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-07-29, 19:37:

In principle, you should be able to connect an IDE drive to an IDE interface. I have connected a DVD-Rom to a 16bit ISA-IO in a 486 and it worked. But to not complicate things further, lets keep win95 out of the equation. Get the drive to be recognized by the machines bios. You want to see some written statement on the screen that it was detected.

Be careful with that recommendation. If your mainboard BIOS does not yet support booting from CD, the BIOS does not print any message about CD drives being detected. The Pentium 133 system with a 430HX we had back in the day did originally not print anything about CD drives until some BIOS update added CD booting support. I would recommend to start with DOS or Windows 95 in "command prompt only" mode, and trying to load a DOS IDE CD-ROM driver from CONFIG.SYS. Any sensible DOS IDE CD-ROM driver should detect a CD drive on the secondary IDE connector without any further configuration. If configuration is required, use "port: 170, IRQ 15" for the secondary port.

Make sure the jumpering on the CD drive is correctly set to "master" (MS) or "slave" (SL), especially if you use a standard 40-pin IDE cable that does not provide the necessary signals for cable select (CSEL/CS)

mkarcher wrote on 2024-07-29, 20:11:

Be careful with that recommendation.

That is why I asked for details.

To mkarcher and ux-3: thank you for your thorough answers! I will do more tests with other IDE CD drives, and document how I plugged them in/connected them. I will do this tomorrow as it is past midnight for me currently. The past few days have been very busy for me, which is why it took so long for me to respond (sorry). Thanks again!