Help! Having a problem with CD-ROM support on boot floppy

[TheWiseOwl]

I'm building my first system and am having a problem getting to the CD-ROM to load the OS. I have a Creative Labs 52X CD-ROM drive. I need to create a boot floopy with support for this IDE device. I keep getting an error "No Drives Found, Aborting Installation" during the floppy boot while loading the SBIDE.SYS driver (this is version 2.0 from the vendor's site)

The Creative Labs site says to setup the following in a config.sys file:

device=SBIDE.SYS /n /0|/1|/a /d:<name> /p:<xxx>,<yy>,zzz

where:

/n - optional - no plug &amp; play

/0 - all in pio mode
/1 - only read commands in DMA more (partial DMA mode)
/a - all commands in full DMA mode (requires emm386.exe)

/d - device that matches name in MSCDEX.EXE

/p - <xxx> is port address
<yy> is IRQ number
<zzz> is optional secondary port number

So the question is: How do I find out the port address and IRQ number for the IDE CD-ROM?

During the boot process a screen flashes that displays a PCI DEVICE LISTING with things like bus no, device no, function no, vendor/device class and IRQ. Nothing that says &quot;port address&quot;. Also, should I be looking at the MASS STORAGE CONTROLLER or the MULTIMEDIA DEVICE?

Another way I have tried to fix this problem is using Creative's CTLOAD.EXE in the autoexec.bat in place of the above line in my config.sys. Again, they are wanting a /P:xxx,yy parameter. Their example shows /P:1E8,11. This did not work on my system.

So, without loading the driver correctly, of course the MSCDEX does not complete. I'm just SOL until somebody can help me. This should be just such a simple thing...


My System
Duron 600, KA7-RAID, 128mb PC133
2 IBM GXP 15GB drives using raid 1 on IDE 3 and 4 (ATA100)
Creative Labs 52X CD-ROM on IDE 1
Cheap VGA PCI card until my GeForce MX gets here (PCI slot 1)
SBLive value (PCI slot 2)
Linksys Ethernet card (PCI slot 3)

 

[jmorrell]

Unless Creative Labs uses some weird CDROM driver, you shouldn't need the IRQ and port address to load the driver. The minimum you need in config.sys to load most CDROM drivers is device=SBIDE.SYS /D:mscd001, where mscd001 matches the drive name used for the CDROM in the mscdex line of autoexec.bat. This should work just fine. If this doesn't work, try borrowing a Win98 boot disk from a friend. That should allow you to boot your computer to load the OS. Another option is to download Ultimate Boot Disk from the web. I can't recall where I got it, but a search should find it.

 

[TheWiseOwl]

I think the /P parameter is required, but let's try it...

OK, more testing with just the /D parameter... same thing as before.

I have also tried moving hardware around such as:

IDE 1, master
IDE 1, slave
IDE 2, mster
IDE 2, slave
changing the IDE cable and trying both connectors

I'll go search the web for the Ultimate Boot Disk and if I can find it see what that does.

Anybody else have any ideas?

SOL in Dallas

 

[TheWiseOwl]

Got it working!

I downloaded the Ultimate Boot Disk from the web, but it still didn't work (same error, can't find disk...). On the other hand, it did display that the Creative CD-ROM was at port &quot;1F0&quot;. So I stuck in my original 98 boot disk with /P=1F0,yy where yy was 1 to 15 until I can up with the right IRQ. It ends up that 14 worked and I was able to access the CD! Case closed.

Gee, still wondering why I had to go through all this horseshit, but it's working now and I can get on with installing WindowsME. Thanks for the help.