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Getting CD drive working on 486

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First post, by thenix

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Hi everyone. I have an HP Vectra XM2 486 computer. Long story short I was trying to put a cd drive on it. I connected it as the slave on a ribbon cable also connected to my hard drive. Looking in the bios though there are no settings for a cd drive. Of course the computer doesn't recognize it has a cd drive attached then once I start up. Am I just not able to put a cd drive on this computer then or is there a way to get it working? Thanks for the help.

Reply 1 of 2, by jakethompson1

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Before bootable CDs the bios didn't know or care about cd-rom drives. What OS are you running? In Win95 it should just work. For DOS you need to find an atapi cd driver and load it in config.sys. oakcdrom.sys and xcdrom.sys are common generic ones for atapi (IDE) cds. Then you need mscdex in your autoexec.bat. Mscdex should load before smartdrv. There should be good info about this online. Also are you using slave or cable select as the jumper on the drive? On 486 machines we usually set the jumpers specifically to master/slave back then.

Reply 2 of 2, by thenix

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jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-23, 03:02:

Before bootable CDs the bios didn't know or care about cd-rom drives. What OS are you running? In Win95 it should just work. For DOS you need to find an atapi cd driver and load it in config.sys. oakcdrom.sys and xcdrom.sys are common generic ones for atapi (IDE) cds. Then you need mscdex in your autoexec.bat. Mscdex should load before smartdrv. There should be good info about this online. Also are you using slave or cable select as the jumper on the drive? On 486 machines we usually set the jumpers specifically to master/slave back then.

I will try to find the drivers like you mention. I am running DOS 6.22. I think I know how to find the config.sys file and edit it to load a driver. I'll try it out when I get a chance soon. Thanks for your help.

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