How to get CD-ROM drive to show up in DOS?

[WAZ]

The title pretty much asks it all. I just want to be able to restart my computer in DOS mode and have it recognize my CD drive. Right now, it says "Invalid drive specification". Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks-
WAZ

 

[AndyHui]

Make sure that you have loaded the driver for the CDROM in CONFIG.SYS, ie

CDROM.SYS /D:MSCD000

and MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 in the AUTOEXEC.BAT.

 

[blstriker]

I always keep around a win98 startup boot disk no matter what OS i'm installing b/c the win98 startup boot disk has built in cdrom drivers. Very convienent.

 

[han888]

just make a start up disk like blstriker said, it's will detect automatically your cd rom

 

[Jeff H]

A couple of additions to what's already been said. First, identify the manufacturer of your CD-ROM drive and go to their site to look for drivers. Alternatively, if your system is from an OEM like Dell or Gateway, go to their site for CD-ROM DOS drivers.

As has been said, the Win98 Start Up Disk has drivers on it for common ATAPI and SCSI CD-ROM drives (Adaptec, for SCSI). If your drive doesn't respond to one of the ATAPI drivers, or is on a SCSI controller other than Adaptec, you'll need to get either the drive's DOS driver or your SCSI card's DOS drivers.

Many CD-ROM DOS drivers can benefit from two additional command line arguments in the MSCDEX.EXE line in your autoexec.bat. At the end of that line add the command argument l:x, where x is the drive letter of your CD-ROM. Also on that line add m:4, which sets up a buffer for the CD-ROM drive. Note: if you add the drive letter argument, you should also add the following line to your config.sys file - lastdrive=z .

Bottom line is you may need to do some experimenting to find the optimal setup for your CD-ROM DOS driver.

 

[Cubensis]

Never use DOS.
Use something else (if possible)

 

[PowerJoe]

My take on the subject

-PJ

 

[WAZ]

Thanks a lot for all the help!

I don't *want* to use DOS, but I was going through my old games -- NHL Hockey (94), Wayne Gretzky 3, Crusader, a few others -- and thought I'd give them a shot again. But they're all required to run in DOS. I got them working now, thanks to you guys (and/or gals).

WAZ

 

[blstriker]

Hmm, now i'm gonna go dig up my old space invaders on dos. I don't think it'll run properly on today's cpu's. They don't have the proper timing code so the game will end a millisecond after you hit start! Wow, am I complaining that today's cpus are too fast? Hehehe..