It means GSCDROM.SYS didn't load properly, for some reason.

at a quick glance that all looks okay to me. for the record I use GSCDROM all the time and I've never had a drive it didn't work with. then again Packard bells can be weird.

try not loading it into high memory and see if that does anything maybe? make sure the driver and mscdex and everything is indeed in the folders there supposed to be?

What if you try using the bootdisk that comes with Win9x? as a test They were pretty good at detecting a CD drive?

If it doesn't work even with a windows 98 boot disk for example, then you should also look at cabling

Have you tried using a different cdrom driver like oakcdrom.sys or vide-cdd.sys?

Is the CD-ROM drive detected by the bios?

Yeah the CD-ROM is detected by BIOS the original 8x drive that came with this machine was shot so I replaced it with a 48x and bios detects it and it knows what to do with it in windows. However when I boot into DOS I cannot use the drive and MSCDEX is not working properly, so that means it's simply a matter of drivers right? It's odd but I'll try some other drivers and see what happens it may be just the Packard being it's usual troublesome self. 😜

Also removing the LH in the Autoexec should take it out of high mem right? It's been a long time since I've messed with this stuff so I'm a bit foggy on a lot of the options and commands. 🤣

What my goal is is to get DOS to recognize the CD-ROM so I can create a DOS boot floppy and then do a system restore with the old Master disk I have. Which is all to get my Packard Bell OEM sound card to work. 🤣

Ok, try this. Download SHSUCDEX which is a replacement for MSCDEX and also download VIDE-CDD.SYS which is a universal cdrom driver.

http://www.hiren.info/downloads/dos-files

I'm typing this on my mobile so I'm unable to test the download links but they should be fine.

Once you have these 2 files. Create a "CDROM" directory in dos and place the 2 files in it.

Edit autoexec.bat and insert the following line:

LH C:\CDROM\SHSUCDEX /D:"name of your drive" /M:15 /E /S /L:D /V

Edit config.sys and insert the following line:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDROM\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:"name of your drive"

Make sure that where I've written "name of your drive" that you enter whatever the name is without the " on either side of the name and that the name does not exceed 8 letters. Mine for instance says /D:SONY-DVD . The name also needs to be identical in both your autoexec and config lines.

Basically your autoexec and config lines were correct and all we're really doing is trying a new cdrom driver and replacing MSCDEX.

Let me know how you go 😀

Oh my gosh! Thank you dude! It works flawlessly! :DDD

Thank you again! You really helped me out here. But what does all the options mean in the autoexec? (/m:15 /e /s /v)

As a follow up for this question... are there any driver recommended for low memory usage? I mean, a driver that uses less memory than the rest.

Zup wrote:

As a follow up for this question... are there any driver recommended for low memory usage? I mean, a driver that uses less memory than the rest.

UIDE.

Takes 5k in UMBs and that's it. You'll get a free XMS disk/CD/floppy cache too.

🤣 Well I seemed to have fucked things up. Somehow my BIOS is not detecting the CDROM drive after installing Win95 from CDROM. 🤣
What to do now... 🙁

NVM I fixed it. I put it as slave to the HDD and put it on that ribbon. It would seem something is wrong with the other ide ribbon. 😁

@King_Corduroy, really glad you managed to get everything working 😀

Regarding the additional switches, they are not required but I use them each time.

/M:15 gives the CD-ROM drive a suitable amount of buffers. Basically the larger this number is, the less your computer will read directly from the CD-ROM drive.

/E loads these buffers into the expanded memory which needs EMS to be loaded.

/S allows the CD-ROM drive to be seen over a network but is also used to allow certain program's to read the volume label of the disc.

/V displays information on memory usage on boot.

I probably should've left these commands out when I wrote my previous message as you don't really need them but I just wrote it exactly how I write mine each time as I've never had any issues this way so thought "why change it?" Haha

borgie83 wrote on 2014-03-15, 18:07:

Ok, try this. Download SHSUCDEX which is a replacement for MSCDEX and also download VIDE-CDD.SYS which is a universal cdrom driv […]
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Ok, try this. Download SHSUCDEX which is a replacement for MSCDEX and also download VIDE-CDD.SYS which is a universal cdrom driver.

http://www.hiren.info/downloads/dos-files

I'm typing this on my mobile so I'm unable to test the download links but they should be fine.

Once you have these 2 files. Create a "CDROM" directory in dos and place the 2 files in it.

Edit autoexec.bat and insert the following line:

LH C:\CDROM\SHSUCDEX /D:"name of your drive" /M:15 /E /S /L:D /V

Edit config.sys and insert the following line:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDROM\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:"name of your drive"

Make sure that where I've written "name of your drive" that you enter whatever the name is without the " on either side of the name and that the name does not exceed 8 letters. Mine for instance says /D:SONY-DVD . The name also needs to be identical in both your autoexec and config lines.

Basically your autoexec and config lines were correct and all we're really doing is trying a new cdrom driver and replacing MSCDEX.

Let me know how you go 😀

THANK YOU SO MUCH!! IT WORKED FOR ME TOO!!