VOGONS


First post, by troydm

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So I've built this Shuttle HOT-419 486 pc to play dos games and the problem is that I can't make ide cdrom drive to work with it, tried connecting it with two different I/O cards, tried two different cdrom drives, one teac and one samsung/Toshiba, both drives work on socket 7 motherboard with built-in ide connector, so issue is definitely not in the drive, mscdex doesn't recognizes any cdrom devices, and during boot bios doesn't shows that anything additional is connected to ide cable besides ide hdd, tried different master/slave combinations, tried even connecting second i/o card additional to vlb one with jumper set to different irq (15 iirc). Nothing works, so my genuine question if there is any way to make etapi ide drives to work with this, I have Sound blaster card Ct2770 that has Panasonic/Creative IDE connector but from what I understand it was designed to be used only with compatible cdrom drives and since I have no such old one I can't test this connector, what can I do to make my Teac CD-520e cd drive work?

Reply 1 of 3, by NeoG_

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the BIOS probably doesn't have ATAPI support (required for CD-ROM devices), so it is unaware of the drive during the boot sequence. However, you should be able to load a universal IDE ATAPI device driver in config.sys to detect the CD-ROM and then have MSCDEX pick up the device from there. I would try a few drivers (e.g. vide-cdd.sys, oakcdrom.sys) and see which one works.

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Reply 2 of 3, by jakethompson1

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As NeoG_ says, it is normal for the BIOS to not know anything about ATAPI CD-ROM yet they will work anyway using a driver.
If you run HWINFO (HWiNFO support of vintage hardware) and browse to the peripherals/drives part, is it able to detect the drive?

Reply 3 of 3, by Babasha

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Old VLB 486 boards do not support CDROM detection or boot from CDROM

You need bootable disk or floppy with IDE CDROM driver and MSCDEX

config.sys with driver looks like

lastdrive=p
device=himem.sys
device=cdromdrv.sys /D:CDROM001

and autoexec.bat

mscdex /D:CDROM001

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