win 95 & missing cd drive

Seth Brundle

I am working on a win 95 system here and I am encountering a weird prob. If I start the system up I can see the 1Gb primary Master (which doesn't want anything else on its IDE), and I can see a 2GB S. master but not the CD drive which is S. slave.
However if I restart in DOS mode I can see it on the Z: drive and if I restart windows from DOS (win) I can see the CD. However, this won't be a suitable option for its owner.
Any ideas?

joePC

OK clear it up a bit,

2 Hdds
1 CD drive

1 Hdd (Master) on IDE 1
1CD (Slave) 1Hdd (Master) on IDE 2

What exactly is not suitable for the owner the fact that the CD drive is Z:

JoePC

Seth Brundle

the cd is not seen at all unless you restart win 95 in DOS mode. Here if you type Z: and then dir you can read the cd.
If you restart win95 from dos mode (by typing win) the cd drive is recognised.
However, if the machine is started normally then the CD drive is not recognised.

joePC

OK got ya, you could try setting the CD Drive as master instead of slave, the Hdd should still be detected. Also is the drive detected in the BIOS.

Seth Brundle

BIOS reads it fine.
When I change the master slave settings it is still the same (once even didn't recognise either!).

C Fodder

Is there something preventing the CDROM drivers from loading during normal startup? i.e. something commented out in one of the startup files.

joePC

OK I'd try connecting only the Boot drive and CD-Rom, See does Windoze detect it.

Seth Brundle

had tried that and it didn't work. owner has collected it anyway so no worries!
Cheers
K.

hostyle

Seen this years ago. You need to load a DOS driver in your autoexec.bat or something. I've forgotten exactly how, its been so long. I remember installing Win95 from the CD-ROM and once install was finished and rebooted, Windows couldnt find the CD-ROM it was installed from.

Capt'n Midnight

yeah that's right, first thing 95 does is disable the dos drivers and won't pick up the CD again unless you load them first, always good for a laugh when it did it half way though an install and then went looking for files from the CD.

if you see the CD in dosmode it's most likley because of settings in c:\windows\dosstart.bat
you could copy them to the autoexec.bat

if they are REM ed out then remove the REM
device = xxxxxxxx.sys /D:MSCD001 (config.sys)
mscdex /D:MSCD0001 (autoexec.bat)

Golden rule with win95 (and win98) is to copy the win95 folder to the HDD and run setup from there

Seth Brundle

I stuck a spare copy of win2k onto it in the end (display drivers went kaput somehow even though I never touched them) and is working fine now!
Cheers folks for the help