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CD-ROM woes

M

MoonSword

Member
What I first thought to be a basic problem with my ATAPI CD-ROM has turned out to be quite more complicated than I first imagined.

I shall explain the issue in detail...

I have a rig ("Solar Rift"), utilizing mostly old parts, that I am trying to install Windows 98SE on so that my girlfriend can use it for the internet. You can view the stats of the rig at http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13130

The motherboard is an ECS P5TX Bpro (rev 2.0a). It uses the Intel 430TX PCI set. It appears to be a fine board to run my old AMD K6 200 processor. Now, don't go nagging me to upgrade the sucker. 200 MHz is all I need for what I intend to use it for. I have another rig for when I need more computing power.

Anyways, I want Windows 98SE, but I need a working CD-ROM to do that. Now, the CD-ROM is a 50x Asus model S500. I didn't have any ATAPI CD-ROMs in my museum of parts. In fact, the Asus drive is my *only* ATAPI drive in my collection of parts! All my other CD-ROMs laying around are either Panasonic proprietary or SCSI-2. And I wouldn't mind using a SCSI-2 drive in Solar Rift, except I do not have a spare SCSI host card.

So, I bought the least expensive ATAPI drive I could find, and that ended up being this Asus 50x drive. The Asus drive works fine. I've tested it in my other rig, Lunar Rift, and I have no problems there at all. In fact, it preformed quite well in Lunar Rift. However, in Solar Rift, the drive will not behave. The ECS motherboard will detect the drive during POST (Secondary Master), but once control is handed over to the OS, the CD-ROM cannot be accessed. The device driver provided with the CD-ROM (for use in DOS) fails to detect the presence of this CD-ROM. The generic Oak ATAPI driver provided on a Win98SE boot floppy acts the same way. In fact, I can't even boot from a bootable CD-ROM, even though both the motherboard and CD-ROM support that feature. Now, I know the driver isn't at fault, because as I said everything works A-okay on Lunar Rift, but it will not behave on Solar Rift.

I know the IDE device works on Solar's motherboard, as I have no trouble accessing hard disks.

I'm really at my wits end. All my hardware checks out, I've quadruple checked all cables and connections, but the CD-ROM will not interface with the motherboard. It's a standard ATAPI drive. Nothing special. The motherboard is a run of the mill Socket-7, supporting Pentiums and K6s up to 233 MHz.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks.

Moon

Edit: Forgot to mention I already have the latest BIOS available from ECS's website already flashed. It's not very recent, though.
 
Have you tried manually setting the transfer mode in the bios? You could try enabling the udma mode first(pio disabled). If not, do the reverse and enable pio, disable udma. If neither work, you could also try hooking it up to the Primary controller as a slave device to the HDD to see if it is a problem with the secondary controller.

eplebnista
 
I'm not familiar with that motherboard but could there be a problem with the mode transfers? Like using a UDMA 66 cable instead of a UDMA 33? I don't know what mode that motherboard supports.
 
The motherboard is a Socket-7 with Intel 430TX chipset. It supports ATA-33, but nothing higher. I'm using a 40 pin IDE cable, of which I have tested elsewhere and works fine.

The CD-ROM is UDMA-33 compatible, and I had the UDMA setting in the CMOS set to "auto", but I'll play with it and see if it helps. Thanks.

Moon
 
I figured it out. Both IDE channels are trying to use the same IRQ (IRQ 14), and in that situation, the CD-ROM won't work on the secondary IDE channel. In another computer I tested the CD-ROM in, the two IDE channels were on seperate IRQs (IRQs 14 & 15), and the CD-ROM worked fine. I figured this out by comparing the PnP bootup configuration with info in MSD.EXE (I didn't have Windows installed... that was the goal to achieve!) Not a fun task as MSD.EXE is a suckful diagnostic tool. But as soon as I removed the primary slave hard disk and installed the CD-ROM onto that channel, the CD-ROM worked fine.

Live and learn. Thanks for your time, guys. 🙂

Moon
 
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