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Saturday, April 11, 2009

Installing CDROM drivers in DOS, WIN 3.1, Win95

In order to use a CD-ROM Drive, your computer must first have a CD-ROM software driver installed. This is usually supplied with the drive but may not necessarily have been installed. The CD-ROM software driver is normally supplied on a floppy disk and includes a SETUP or INSTALL program. Following installation, the CD-ROM software driver is normally loaded at system startup time via a series of entries in the machine's C:\CONFIG.SYS & C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT files.
For example:

[config.sys]
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
LASTDRIVE=F

[autoexec.bat]
LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /l:D
The first /D: switch is the drive number, which must be the same in both config.sys and autoexec.bat. In the above example its "/D:mscd001". (If you had 2 drives fitted the second may be /D:mscd002) The /l:D switch sets a drive letter for your CD-ROM. (In this case Drive D:\) You can make this anything you want after your Hard Drives that is not taken, but make sure you put a "LASTDRIVE=" line at the end of config.sys to allow for enough environmental space. This can be made as the letter after your last drive in use (i.e. =F) as each letter used, uses a small piece of available environment. (LASTDRIVE=Z would enable ALL available Drive Letters) In this example HIMEM.SYS is used to load driver into upper memory block.
oakcdrom.sys = CD-ROM Driver (Which is named differently by each manufacturer) and can be located in its own directory.
MSCDEX.EXE is provided as part of MS-DOS and sometimes on Install Disk as well.
HIMEM.SYS is provided as part of MS-DOS and enables use of the upper memory area.

Source : http://oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/cdrom.htm

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