Right. So this guy gave me a laptop. It’s a DEC HiNote UltraII, model CT475. It has a 4x MobileMedia CDROM drive. I formatted the hard drive to reinstall Windows, and now I absolutely, positively cannot get the durn thing to see my CDROM. I have downloaded what appears to be a DOS CDROM driver, and whipped up an autoexec.bat and config.sys file that seem correct, but to no avail. The autoexec.bat file reads:
c:\mscdex.exe /d:mscd001 /l:d
and the config.sys is:
device=c:\doscdrom.sys /d:mscd001
However, when I run autoexec from the c: prompt or just reboot, I get:
Device driver not found: 'mscd001'
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
Any ideas? Anyone? I’ve been working on this for two days, and I’m going batty.
Other stuff you should know - DEC (aka Digital) is out of business, so I can’t just call 'em up and get some help, woe is me. The laptop doesn’t have an internal floppy drive, but an attachment that uses the same port as the CDROM. So I can’t have both connected simultaneously. However, I can hot swap them. For this reason, all files mentioned previously have been copied to c:, and I’m booting the computer with the cdrom drive attached.
Anyone who gives me some useful help or hints gets 1 to 5 gold stars in my big book of cool, depending on how useful the help or hint is.
Yep. As I said, all files previously mentioned are on c:. This is so I don’t have it looking in paths that don’t exist (such as the floppy drive, when it’s not installed).
It looks like you might have the wrong driver. This appears to possibly be the driver for the CD in the DEC multimedia docking station not the portable CD that can be hot swapped.
Have you tried creating a bootable CD in the windows control panel “add/remove” programs applet and copying all those files to the C:\ drive and then changing the config.sys and the autoexec.bat to look at C:\ instead of A:. There are several generic CD drivers on that floppy that windows cycles through. Once might do the trick for you.
" This is a docking station with sound and CD-ROM built in. The drivers that are listed on this board are for the sound portion, I have used the file called doscdrom.sys that is included but it does not work with the cdrom drive. All I need is one file, and I have scoured the web for the file but with no luck. The files name is deccdrom.sys also compaq’s site was no help. Please email me this file if you have it."
astro, you have my sincere thanks. I already scoured driverguide.com many times, and I have the deccdrom.sys file (available from Compaq’s legacy support page). I’m not sure how it worked, but, as usual, admitting my ignorance publicly fixed the problem. As far as I know, I didn’t do anything but reboot for the umpteenth time. But I’m not questioning my good fortune. Just wanted to ask that you devote your brainpower to other urgent questions, as this one’s been resolved. Thanks again.
The messages you got are from MSCDEX, and indicates that it failed to connect to the driver in config.sys. There should be an error message from doscdrom.sys. What message (error or otherwise)is it giving? Check to make sure that the driver is not in an optional boot section. If you have sections, make sure it is under [common].
Well, like I said, the problem’s been fixed, but in the interest of learning more, allow me to answer both ftg and handy’s questions in one fell swoop.
Guys, the lines I included initially are the entirety of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files, and the error message is as I quoted, no more, no less.
Something that makes no sense to me at all is that the CDROM only works in DOS after booting and rebooting. That is, when I start up the computer, nothing. When I ctrl-alt-del, presto! CDROM action! Any input on that?
You see, there are two kinds of cdrom drives, IDE & ATAPI. Yours is so old its probably IDE, these require a setup disk. The other kind is extrememly simple to use, which is probably why IDE ones are on the way out.