Booted from floppy, can't read from CD-ROM drives

[pianoman1948]

I have been having something strange and different happening recently when I boot from one of those Windows 98 startup floppies that loads drivers for my 2 CD-ROM drives.

At the A: prompt, I put in a CD, then enter the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive, which comes up ok. When I do a dir, I get the first line of the display with the name of the CD, but then it hangs. The CD drive spins for awhile, and eventually that message comes up that you usually get when you forgot to put in the floppy or CD, something like:

Not ready reading from drive G:
Abort, Retry or Fail?

What's weird is, it IS reading the name of the CD.

This used to work fine, as far as I know I haven't changed anything. Anybody ever see this?

Thanks,
Ted

[pianoman1948]

I should mention that in Windows, the CD drives work fine. And I can boot from a CD too. So it's not a hardware problem with the CD drives, cables, etc. Must be a driver problem only within the context of booting from a floppy. But it always *used* to work ... <shrug>

On my hard drive, I have 4 installations of Windows, 2 2000 and 2 XPs .. but that should be irrelevant. PC CHips P4 M925LR mobo, 1.6 GHz.

[Dan Penny]

First, if your O/S installations are on NTFS volumes, and you're booting with a DOS based floppy, you won't be able to "see" them with a DOS floppy. ie; no hard disks will be "present", so you won't be able to go anywhere or do anything once you get the command line.

That being said, have you tried another boot floppy?

You could try another cdrom driver. VIDE-CDD.SYS is a good generic driver with a small memory footprint. Search the net or get it from my webspace;

http://www.cyberus.ca/~danpenny/VIDE-CDD.SYS

You will have to edit the cd driver load line in config.sys on the floppy to reflect the new driver name.

[pianoman1948]

Thanks very much for your response, Dan.

First, if your O/S installations are on NTFS volumes, and you're booting with a DOS based floppy, you won't be able to "see" them with a DOS floppy. ie; no hard disks will be "present", so you won't be able to go anywhere or do anything once you get the command line.<scratching head> Maybe I am missing something. The os I am running is on the floppy, and what I am trying to access is the CD-ROM drive. I wouldn't think what is on the hard drive (os installations or anything else) would matter at all here. It could even be disconnected.

But, to answer your "if": I have 6 partitions on my hard drive; some are FAT32 and some are NTFS. When I boot from the floppy, I have no trouble accessing C: (which is not NTFS). I didn't try any of the others.

That being said, have you tried another boot floppy?Yes, same result.


You could try another cdrom driver. VIDE-CDD.SYS is a good generic driver with a small memory footprint. Search the net or get it from my webspace;

http://www.cyberus.ca/~danpenny/VIDE-CDD.SYS

You will have to edit the cd driver load line in config.sys on the floppy to reflect the new driver name.Will do, although that doesn't answer the question why the driver that has been working fine for years suddenly doesn't anymore. It's that Oakleaf one that comes on the Windows 98 startup disks. What is really weird is that it *starts* to work (gets the CD name) and then quits.

I have a good basic knowledge, but I feel like I am missing some of the technical details of drivers, .sys, .inf, .vxd, etc etc., and what is meant by "installing" a driver, especially when booting to a floppy (i.e., outside of Windows, at a more basic level). Can you point me to a good site to get educated?

Thanks again,
Ted

[Dan Penny]

Yeah, I forgot the whole idea was the CDROM's, not the hard disks. ;>} I got carried away.

If you're getting the same results with other floppies/drivers, and it happens with all cd's, I would think;

1) dirty drive (lens)
2) drive/cable going bad
3) controller getting flakey

But it appears as though you've eliminated these possibilities. Try the VIDE-CDD.SYS and post back with the results.

DOS Info; (Links contain other links as well)
This one goes back to early dos...
http://http://www.eiu.edu/~philos/retro/dos/

Fred Langa article...
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=L1TVE43PAQPSIQSNDBCCK HSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=13000278

DOS Command Index...
http://www.easydos.com/dosindex.html

[pianoman1948]

Thanks very much, will do ... tonight (the computer in question is at home and I am at work). That Fred Langa stuff looks very good.

The first link seems to be re-routed to www.microsoft.com ... that can't be right!

Talk 2 u later ... hopefully I can figure out how to change what driver is loaded,
Ted

[Dan Penny]

I tried the link and got a 404 message. Sorry. ???? Try pasting it directly into the address bar. (I tried that and it worked.) As follows;

http://www.eiu.edu/~philos/retro/dos/

EDITED: Huh, now the above works from the posting for me. ???

"Mine is not to reason why, mine is to do or die."
(Unknown)

[pianoman1948]

Hey Dan -

I think I solved the problem. I could have sworn I could access the CD-ROM drives before with these startup disks, but maybe I am mistaken.

I appreciate the offer of your driver, but I bumbled around the net long enough that I found the specific driver for my drives, which are CyberDrv CW058D. I managed to learn enough to change autoexec.bat and config.sys on one of those floppies to load it, and lo and behold, CDs seem to work fine now. Guess the generic Oakleaf driver that comes on those Windows 98 startup disks was too generic. Thanks and I apologize for bothering you,

Ted

[Dan Penny]

No bother. That's why the forum exists, to help.

[pianoman1948]

I don't remember things like I used to (memory is the second thing to go with age), but I suppose it's possible that the last time I used a startup floppy to access a CD from DOS was on my previous computer, a prehistoric Gateway. Duh.

[Paleo Pete]

DAN: take a llook at the first link you posted, it has the HTTP part twice.That's why it won't work. Paste it into your address bar and remove the first HTTP section, it should then work.

[pianoman1948]

Well, how about that, right you are. Why in the world would a bogus url take me to microsoft.com?