BIOS doesn't care about makes, speed, etc. Just as long as the secondary channel is set to say auto rather then disabled you should be fine and this should be fine as you are swapping out drive.
IDE drives are pretty generic in dos as well, although there is the rare drive that don't like generic drivers. I would try a Win9x boot disk as its pretty good at picking up CD drives, or failing that seeing if you can find the actual ms-dos driver for your drive.

But mostly you should be able to attach any IDE optical drive CD, DVD, burner, whatever and 9 out of 10 times Dos will continue as if nothing has changed

chinny22 wrote:

BIOS doesn't care about makes, speed, etc. Just as long as the secondary channel is set to say auto rather then disabled you should be fine and this should be fine as you are swapping out drive.
IDE drives are pretty generic in dos as well, although there is the rare drive that don't like generic drivers. I would try a Win9x boot disk as its pretty good at picking up CD drives, or failing that seeing if you can find the actual ms-dos driver for your drive.

But mostly you should be able to attach any IDE optical drive CD, DVD, burner, whatever and 9 out of 10 times Dos will continue as if nothing has changed

This motherboard has the ESS688 built in to it. Is it not the case that some sound cards had an IDE interface on them that required a CD-ROM manufactured by a certain company? I do not know if this is the case with the on-board ESS688, but I could not get the 8 x Speed drive to work. I think the drive may actually be faulty. I have a lot of other spares but they are all too fast, apart from a drive manufactured in 1994 by Creative (CR-563-B), but I think this one does need a sound blaster with the IDE plug on it. I wanted to put an x4 or x8 drive in there, because I was experiencing slow performance on a few games that stream from the CD. I think the one in there is a x2 but don't know for sure.

If the cable is going to your HDD first then you can be confident its using a standard IDE interface. I doubt if anyone ever integrated more then the sound component of a card into a motherboard, just doesn't make economic sense. (The motherboard will already have a IDE controller chip, why pay to integrate a 2nd one attached to the sound card)

I think your right that the Creative drive needs to be attached to a SB16, but its not IDE its the Panasonic interface. Cable is the same but pinot is very different and not compatible. Usually the driver for this is called something like SBCD.sys from memory.

You can try using a faster drive with a slow down utility, few people do that round here

chinny22 wrote:

If the cable is going to your HDD first then you can be confident its using a standard IDE interface. I doubt if anyone ever integrated more then the sound component of a card into a motherboard, just doesn't make economic sense. (The motherboard will already have a IDE controller chip, why pay to integrate a 2nd one attached to the sound card)

I think your right that the Creative drive needs to be attached to a SB16, but its not IDE its the Panasonic interface. Cable is the same but pinot is very different and not compatible. Usually the driver for this is called something like SBCD.sys from memory.

You can try using a faster drive with a slow down utility, few people do that round here

I have never used a slow down utility for a CD-ROM. How does that work?

rick12373 wrote:

I have never used a slow down utility for a CD-ROM. How does that work?

Exactly the way it sounds – it keeps the CD-ROM drive from spinning faster than a particular maximum speed, and thus ensures that it operates much more quietly. It's largely unnecessary if you're playing a game that uses redbook CD audio, though.

Jorpho wrote:

rick12373 wrote:

I have never used a slow down utility for a CD-ROM. How does that work?

Exactly the way it sounds – it keeps the CD-ROM drive from spinning faster than a particular maximum speed, and thus ensures that it operates much more quietly. It's largely unnecessary if you're playing a game that uses redbook CD audio, though.

How do I actually do this? Is there a thread on it already or instructions elsewhere online?

https://www.google.ca/search?q=site:vogons.or … m+speed+control

Try to use teac_cdi.sys with key /S:4.
Link: http://www.rm.com/_RMVirtual/Media/Downloads/teac24x.zip

Example:
DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\teac_cdi.sys /D:MSCD001 /S:4

You need two entries for Dos to see CD roms.

One in your autoexec.bat file eg:

LOADHIGH=C:\Dos\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001

And one in your config.sys file eg:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\CD-ROM\CD_IDE.SYS /D:MSCD001

I have an 8 speed drive in my CDS 524 running a 486DX2/66 and it doesn't require any slow down program. It is set up as a slave drive to a 2gig hdd. On systems this old I prefer to use cdrom drives without any speed rating on the tray. This system has become quite picky of late on what software will or wont run. Almost tempted to scrap it.