Can I install CD Drives?

I have been given 3 pc by a friend of my wife (definately not a friend of mine). They are p75, 16mg, 545mg HDD, floppy, 10baseT NIC in each. I plugged a CD drive into one last night, booted (win95)and saw no CD in My Computer. I figured CD was disabled in BIOS; rebooted to BIOS (one of those awful point and click Bios's I hate) and found no support for a CD drive. No support for a larger HDD either.

The guy supplied an office 97 disc, but I really dont wanna have to plug these into my LAN to install office. Is there any way I can get a CD drive to install on these machines? If it is possible, how is it done?

And before you say it, I have suggested he buy a new machine!!!

Regards,

Saber <IMG SRC="smilies/biggrin.gif" border="0">

Are you slaving it to the hard drive? I believe the old machines used cable select cables, and there should be a jumper setting on the back of the cdrom drive.

If hooking as a slave to a HD, make sure the HD is jumpered for master, and the CD-ROM for slave.

If hooking to a secondary controller, jumper it for a master, make sure the secondary controller is enabled in the BIOS, and assure that windows has both the primary and seconday IDE controllers listed in device manager....if they are not, run Add/New Hardware wizard to see if it will pick up the secondary controller.

Also, check in the device manager for any conflicts on the IDE controllers or if they are perhaps running in MS-DOS Compatibility Mode!

I'm not sure what you're looking for as far as CD-ROM support in the BIOS, you don't really need to do anything other than maybe set whatever IDE channel you have it on to "Auto"......and if the BIOS has a point-and-click GUI, it should be new enough that it should have LBA functions, they're just not where you are used to seeing them!

Let us know how you make out!!!!!

Thanks for the advise - they were going to be masters on the second IDE channel.

I have had a look around work, and have salvaged 3 p133 boards that i'm gonna replace them with, but I'd like to work it out before I do that, just for the hell of it.

I'll post back if I get a result.

Cheers,

Saber

Also, update the Bios if possible. Sometimes it helps out a lot.

win95 ver. A has a known issue with cdroms.

Make sure and load the dos cd.sys driver out out of the config.sys, windows should then pick it up.

Since these systems probably dont have much ram. Setting the supplemental cache to min. will give you up to a meg. memory available to the system.

control panel/system/performance/file system/cdrom

I think DOS drivers for CD model is way
to go. Readme file for model gives
correct command lines to insert into
config.sys and autoexec.bat.

Once recognised, Win95 will take over.

Quote:

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Originally posted by RicardoDelSanMartinValencia:
<STRONG>I think DOS drivers for CD model is way
to go. Readme file for model gives
correct command lines to insert into
config.sys and autoexec.bat.

Once recognised, Win95 will take over.</STRONG>

---

Actually, installing DOS drivers will not cause WIN95 to "Take Over". It will just run the CD-ROM as a dos drive.

The drive may read in Windows 95 that way, but that would not really be helping to solve his problems, and will more than likely throw his IDE controllers into MS-DOS compatibility mode!