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Which driver for my CD-ROM?

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First post, by AlessandroB

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First of all, I want to use it under DOS. I have this CD-ROM connected to the docking station, but I have no idea what type of bus it uses. I tried the standard CD1.sys driver, but it doesn't seem to work. Can someone explain what type of bus it uses and what kind of driver I would need?

If I used a PCMCIA CD-ROM instead of this bulky docking station, wouldn't that be better? Would it work under DOS? Which models are problem-free? I read that loading the drivers for the PCMCIA port and the CD-ROM connected to the PCMCIA port wastes a lot of memory and makes it difficult to load games. Is that true?

Thanks

Reply 1 of 6, by jmarsh

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The driver has loaded, now you have to load MSCDEX.

Reply 2 of 6, by AlessandroB

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jmarsh wrote on Today, 21:22:

The driver has loaded, now you have to load MSCDEX.

I also loaded that into the autoexec.bat file. Maybe I typed it wrong? I'll check tomorrow. So is this cd1.sys driver suitable for the CD-ROM installed in this docking station?

Reply 3 of 6, by wierd_w

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the "/D:FOOBAR" line needs to match between the cdrom driver, and MSCDEX.

The usual stock line is "/D:MSCDoo1" but it can be literally anything. Some CDrom driver install wizards name it "BANANA", for instance. It only needs to be a unique name for that CDrom's driver. (Suppose you had both an ATAPI and a SCSI CDROM drive present. One driver would need a different identifier than the other, so that MSCDEX can correctly talk with the correct handler, for the correct drive.)

Reply 4 of 6, by AlessandroB

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wierd_w wrote on Today, 22:13:

the "/D:FOOBAR" line needs to match between the cdrom driver, and MSCDEX.

The usual stock line is "/D:MSCDoo1" but it can be literally anything. Some CDrom driver install wizards name it "BANANA", for instance. It only needs to be a unique name for that CDrom's driver. (Suppose you had both an ATAPI and a SCSI CDROM drive present. One driver would need a different identifier than the other, so that MSCDEX can correctly talk with the correct handler, for the correct drive.)

Tomorrow i check thanks. You mean that the driver is correct for this CD-ROM drive?

Reply 5 of 6, by wierd_w

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The ATAPI cdrom driver found the drive. Yes.

From the image, the line to feed to MSCDEX should be something like this:

LH MSCDEX.EXE /D:12345678

Reply 6 of 6, by wierd_w

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A more complete explanation:

DOS does not know how to handle CDrom drives, or CDRom fileystems, natively.

To accomplish this, DOS needs an IFS (Installable Filesystem) provider to extend its support. Microsoft provided a generic CDRom/DVDRom IFS, in the form of MSCDEX (MicroSoft CDrom EXtensions). However, this is just the IFS part, not the code that actually drives the CDROM drive. (It tells DOS how to work with ISO9660, and Joliet/HighSierra CDRom filesystems)

THAT comes from a bus-specific device driver. In your case, CD1.sys, which appears to be an ATAPI driver. Other flavors include SCSI, PCMCIA, Parallel Port, etc. (This tells the computer how to send data back and forth to the drive itself, agnostic of any fileystems)

To let MSCDEX know which bus-specific driver it should coordinate with, the device specific driver uses a user-definable "Device Identifier" name, which is then also provided to MSCDEX. This identifier name is how MSCDEX finds and connects to the bus-specific driver.

TOGETHER, they supply the needed code for DOS to work with CDROM drives.

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