MS-DOS doesn't detect my SATA DVD Writer \ VOGONS

MS-DOS doesn't detect my SATA DVD Writer

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First post, by bjwil1991

Posted on 2014-11-10, 23:21

bjwil1991 Offline

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Hello everybody:

Currently, I'm running an older PC that has only IDE support and disabled the support in order to do tests to see if my PC can see my LG SATA DVD Writer. The card I'm using is a VIA VT6421a SATA RAID with the Memphis BIOS for booting my 60GB Hitachi 2.5" Hard Drive with MS-DOS, which works without issues, but the DVD Writer cannot be seen on the system, no matter what drivers I try to use.

The following drivers are the ones I'm trying out:

1AHCI.sys
2UDVD2.sys
3UIDE.sys (XMS init error)
4GCDROM.SYS
5XGCDROM.SYS

What seems to be the problem? Am I doing configurations wrong for each driver?

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Reply 1 of 3, by Matth79

Posted on 2014-11-11, 00:32

Matth79 Offline

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Are you matching the default device name with MSCDEX / SHSUCDX - different drivers often have a different default name - or you specify the same /D: option on both rather than using the default

Reply 2 of 3, by bjwil1991

Posted on 2014-11-11, 01:36

bjwil1991 Offline

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Location: SE, MI USA

I did the matching for each of the CD/DVD drives:

1
2config.sys
3
4devicehigh=c:\xgcdrom.sys /D:LG /C1
5devicehigh=c:\xgcdrom.sys /D:Gigabyte /UX
6
7autoexec.bat
8
9lh c:\shsucdx.com /D:LG /D:Gigabyte /c

This is the error message I get when it's trying to get the LG SATA DVD Writer to get recognized:

1XGCDROM v2.4b, 09 October 2007
2Driver name is "LG"
3No CD/DVD-ROM drive to use; XGCDROM not loaded!

However, my 52x Gigabyte OEM CD Reader gets detected without issues.
Could it be the onboard IDE interfering with the SATA Optical Drive, and if so, should I hook up the CD Reader and a hard drive to it to see if it'll work?

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Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
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Reply 3 of 3, by kjliew

Posted on 2014-11-11, 09:10

kjliew Offline

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I think this is the inherent deficiency of DOS as a legacy OS.
An add-on PCI SATA RAID controller can identified itself as:
- Native IDE controller
- AHCI controller
- Propriety RAID controller
(*This is rare*) if it can identified as legacy IDE controller, then you will need to disable the on-board IDE controller, otherwise, there will be HW conflicts.

Native IDE controller has the best chance of getting it to work, but you need to find the .SYS CDROM driver that takes non-standard IDE I/O control/command ports. In legacy IDE, the standard I/O decoding is:
- 0x1F0 - 0x1F7 - primary
- 0x170 - 0x177 - secondary
- 0x1E0 - 0x1E7 - tertiary

Native IDE controller gets rid of the hardwired I/O decoding and allows PCI compliant BIOS to assign the I/O resources of any free 8-byte consecutive I/O region. The rest of the SW aspects remain the same as legacy IDE controller. So technically, any SW designed to work with legacy IDE controller can work with Native IDE controller as long as it can take the option of an I/O base address. To be frank, I don't know of any .SYS CDROM drivers working with native IDE controller. Good luck finding one.

Long story short, if you care about DOS, don't buy SATA CDROM.

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