I am trying to get this old 486 to work with this 32x cd-rom drive i put in it but it will not work :( Why not?

[WyteWatt]

No i still have it but could never get cdrom drive to work thru a old SB16 isa sound card which had a cdrom ide connector on it. I guess i will either have to take that HD out put it in my computer then in that one but i do not think thats the best idea because then it will have changed hardware when it goes backi in the older computer. May just try to get a linux that fits on a floppy but i do not think i will beable to find any good one. I was trying to get it to work on a another older Intel celeron 366 mhz but it never wanted to bootup. Think the HD is bad or something. Not sure if the 1 mb video ram got turned off or not by itself when i had a voodoo 3 2000 pci in that computer.

 

[TwilightZone77]

Funny I should see this thread, as I was just restoring my old 486 the other day. The bios doesn't have native support for it, so you need to find some drivers for it. For my old Goldstar 4x, i just found a copy of the drivers on the internet, for dos, and installed them, and they loaded when dos loads. I have no experience with linux, and anyway I'm sure they don't make old dos drivers like that for newer drives. However, when I was reading through a CD-ROM support forum, I heard that using a windows 98 boot disk will give you CD-ROM support (I would assume latter windows versions would work as well), so then at least you can install linux and then maybe linux will recognize it. I haven't tried this out for myself, though.

 

[WyteWatt]

I tried with a windows 98 bootup disk but it would not install because the cdrom drive was never there. Only hard drive (C drive) and d drive (ramdisk drive that windows 98 creates). E drive was not there and i check F too and it was not there either. But i will just maybe one day have a old computer to have just linux on so i can learn it a lot easier without worrying i will mess up something on my system. Plus linux never seemed to like to work with windows for me. Well HD partitions never seem to worked well with me either with linux. Saying strange errors. But its just easier having linux on its own computer.

 

[Tanked]

486's generally don't have native support for CDROM's, but I have never seen one that will not work at all with one.
I had a 486 SX-25 machine with one IDE channel, and it supported CDROM's as long as drivers were loaded for it.

 

[WyteWatt]

Tanked ok well this is a formated HD how would it have to have drivers loaded for it if a OS is not even on it?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

on another note how do you span 2 harddrives?

 

[DSTA]

imtim83

Did you try booting Linux from a floppy?

 

[WyteWatt]

No but how do i boot linux from a floppy please? Never had to do that. Sorry.

 

[DSTA]

Not difficult. Take a look here:

Mandrake 8.1 Installation Guide

What's interesting is this:

3.2 Creating a Boot Disk

HTH