Can you post a pic of the CDROM drive in device manager?

Sidenote: I only recently learned of this BANANA thing. I never encountered it back in the day. I guess because I always made my own custom bootdisks. I will never trust a 3rd party boot disk unless it's an official MS disk.

You don't have two primary channels, only one, and one secondary, one tertiary if you've got three. You need to give the driver the right address, typically 170h for secondary and right IRQ typically 15 for secondary, and calling it BANANA is just a drive descriptor string instead of MSCD001 or something to pass through to MSCDEX, so you are telling MSCDEX to look for BANANA right and not something else?

edit: damn what lame Atapi driver have I been carrying that over from for years, needing to specify /I:15 /A:170 ?? when all these later more general purpose ones probably ignore it... maybe they don't... maybe it doesn't "hunt" so long at boot... not seeing any requirement for that for oakcd.sys anyway. Just do the /D:banana whatever you wanna call it, as long as you can tell MSCDEX the same thing. If it's looking for bandana you'll have a bad time.

Figured it out, it was the CDROM that was the issue.

Windows 95 would detect it and it would work fine but not DOS for some reason, the CDROM is a Matsushita CR-572-B, tried all sorts of MSCDEX configurations but in the end I just replaced the drive with a HL GSA-H41N and DOS picked it up right away as did Windows too.

Would like to know why though.

BitFlip wrote on 2024-03-16, 10:19:

Figured it out, it was the CDROM that was the issue.

Windows 95 would detect it and it would work fine but not DOS for some reason, the CDROM is a Matsushita CR-572-B, tried all sorts of MSCDEX configurations but in the end I just replaced the drive with a HL GSA-H41N and DOS picked it up right away as did Windows too.

Would like to know why though.

I had a Packard Bell 486 with one of those drives. I do remember it needing a special driver. Check these out.

https://archive.org/details/panasoniccdromdrivers

Yeah it's too early to be fully ATAPI compliant I think and needs manufacturer driver. Also IIRC it doesn't support some CDROM formats that you don't even think/worry about because everything more recent does.

Ok I took a look at the "CD ROM GOD" boot floppy to see if the driver filenames would jog my memory and they did!

I'm 99.9% certain you need driver 2:

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-16, 11:57:

Ok I took a look at the "CD ROM GOD" boot floppy to see if the driver filenames would jog my memory and they did!

I'm 99.9% certain you need driver 2:
Screenshot 2024-03-16 065521.png

Hey sorry for the late reply, I tried that driver which does not work however digging around the archive linked above I found a driver for the exact model of drive I have (Matsuhita CR572B) which works.

I've attached said driver here for anyone else who runs into this thread with the same issue.