Who remembers their Windows 3.11 chops? (Help me get CDROM recognized)

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been porting over virtual machines from a PowerPC G4 running Connectix VirtualPC to a modern Intel MacBook Pro using Parallels Desktop. (THAT’S a trip and a half, getting various operating system environments to work when the emulated hardware changes out from under them).

The oldest, my Windows 3.11 for Workgroups environment, can’t really be ported; it’s not in VirtualPC but rather the even-older Insignia Solutions SoftWindows, which emulated a 286 processor machine. So I’m rebuilding it; I formatted a new virtual hard drive as a bootable DOS drive and installed WFW 3.11 on it, moved network card driver, TCP driver, and video card drive in via virtual floppy and got them working.

The CDROM drive isn’t working yet. I downloaded the oakcdrom driver and installed it at the root of the C drive, copied MSCDEX.EXE from the other virtual machine and put it in Windows, edited the config.sys and autoexec.bat files as instructed here except that MSCDEX is in Windows not in Windows\Command and my DEVICEHIGH statement in config.sys reads

DEVICEHIGH=C:\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001

I’m obviously doing some things right but something wrong: the driver is being loaded or recognized but then the LOADHIGH statement in autoexec.bat is failing, see screen shot here. Both autoexec.bat and config.sys reference “D:MSCD001”, I checked for typos.

Any ideas?

2

All those memories have been relegated to my Recycle Bin, but based on the error in your screen cap, it almost looks like there are empty spaces after "/D:MSCD001"

3

Yep, that was it. Thanks for the extra eyes.

4

Sweet! You’re welcome.

5

Did you do the autoexec.bat?

Below is an example of what an autoexec may look like. Typical setup for a SB sound card. I recall vividly those soundblaster kits with cd and sound card plus software. They were nearly $200 when I bought mine from Best Buy around 1995. The early ones had 8 bit sound and a non standard Panasonic cd interface. The cd drive plugged right into the sound card. CD drives with IDE didn’t show up for another couple years.

For this to work, you need the sound blaster floppy.

@echo off
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET PATH=C:\Windows;C:
LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:123

6

It doesn’t matter much since you solved the problem, but IIRC the LOADHIGH command wasn’t introduced until MSDOS version 5 or 6. If the version was older than that LOADHIGH or DEVICEHIGH wouldn’t work at all.