Does DOS have a problem recognizing two cd-rom drives?

[tyro]

Hello

I have recently installed a second cd-rom drive in my computer. when I boot off my windows 98 boot disk it recognizes both cd-rom drives and gives each a drive letter. however, when I boot off my DOS hard drive it doesn't recognize the second cd-rom drive. [it usually gives me an error "mscd001 not recognized" ]

from win98 oakcdrom.sys says 2 devices recognized but from dos it says only one device recognized

I tried:
1. using the oak cd-rom driver and mscdex.exe from the win98 boot disk
2. doing a line by line confirmation for the win98 boot and then copying the syntax as well as I could.
3. using the manufacturer's driver I found online for the cd-rom.
4. copying the way the help file for mscdex on win 6.22 suggest if you have two different drivers for two drives [even though in 98 they both are recognized using the same driver.]

does anybody know a solution to this? any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

DOS (or rather, DOS and your *cdrom.sys and mscdex.exe will recognise as many working CD-Roms, DVDs, writers or whatever ATAPI devices you have connected to IDE cables.

If you have many hard drives/partitions, you may need to set LASTDRIVE=Z in your config.sys file.

Or maybe one of the Roms isn't working?

Did you try installing each drive individually?

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[Accessdabbler]

I believe you will need 2 DEVICE= lines in config.sys, one for each CD drive. As well, you would need 2 MSCDEX lines in Autoexec.bat for each drive.

 

[edfair]

Requires 1 device line if both drives can be recognized by the same driver, then requires 2 mscdex calling the same driver. You'll know both are recognized by the driver reporting such.
And, of course, the last drive setting to allow it to go higher than standard. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[tyro]

Thank you for your help.

I have sort of solved the problem. I reversed the drives so that the slave became the master and vice versa. it then recognized both the drives with one line in the config.sys with one device and one line in the autoexec.bat with one device. It looks something like this:

Config.sys:
device = c:\oakcdrom.sys /d:mscd001

autoexec.bat:
load = c:\mscdex.exe /d:mscd001

this recognizes both drives. but when I reverse the master and slave status again it only recognizes one of the drives. This does not let me boot from the drive I want to boot from [I can only boot from the master not from the slave] my slave drive is a little faster but when I set it up as master it does not recognize the second drive.

Is there a possible reason for this? the drive I want to boot from is a goldstar 8241b (x24).

Thank you very much

 

[roamer1]

I think there is syntax for assigning both letters from MSCDEX.

How much LO mem? need to LOADHIGH and DEVICEHIGH??

If it worked off the boot it should work off the drive
What's the diffs? The boots got newer command.com and mebbe newer MSCDEX, using HIMEM etc.

and how come 6.22?

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Maybe the CD Roms will co-habit if you jumper the CS (Cable Select) option. Some drives just don't play ball on some settings. I know that's vague, but that's how CD-Roms seem to work sometimes.

You don't need to load mscdex or the *.sys file multiple times - I have a Nakamichi 6 CD Changer which uses mscdex just once, and automatically gets assigned a different letter per CD slot. You could try an extra switch, ie

Config.sys:
device = c:\oakcdrom.sys /d:mscd001 /d:mscd002

autoexec.bat:
load = c:\mscdex.exe /d:mscd001 /L /d:mscd002 /L:E (or whatever you want L (drive Letter) to be).

It could be (but it seems unlikely) that the Oak CDRom driver is at fault. I always use the brilliant Samsung SSCDROM.SYS (search for it using Google). However, I have only had difficulties with the Oak driver with a very few ancient CD drives.

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[Cindy1]

I think Citrix has it right when he suggested to jumper them both Cable Select. You may be able to switch them to the way you want.
Cindy

 

[tyro]

Thank you all

I will try setting the jumpers to cable select and see if that works. Do I remember correctly? is it the one in the middle of the cable that becomes master on when set to cable select?

tyro