Microsoft → A Question of Antiques

Just call me an oldtimer who hates to give up. I've resurrected an old 486dx66 w/ 16 mb ram running W95. I am attempting to add a Matsushita CR574b CD-R to it. I have downloaded the drivers from the Matsushita/Panasonic website and installed them. Problem is W95 will not recognize that the CD-R even exists. The controller is a Promise Technologies DC400 Disk Accelerator card. I figured that, since the machine did not originally have a CD, maybe jumper settings needed to be adjusted on the card. Unfortunately, Promise Tech's support staff has no information on this card! So I turn to the collective brainpower of this site...

First question: Do you think I'm on the right track about why W95 isn't recognizing the CD? If not, What?

Second: Anybody have any information on the Promise Tech. DC400 Disk Acc. card?

All contributions gratefully accepted.

Thanks.

Dr.C

Keeping that antique can limit to what you can do and run. Probably a 66mhz bus and about 2 - 3 times that is the cpu speed.

The first step is to get the drive recognized as a simple CDROM. If it's an IDE drive no drivers should be necessary. Does the motherboard also have it's own IDE controller?

It's an ATAPI interface. No controller on the motherboard. Just the DC400.

Boy you sure picked a great controller:) I looked everywhere I could find for any info on this board and couldn't find very much. I did find a few driver files but Promise has nothing that I was able to locate. In order for the CD to be seen by Windows the controller has to be properly installed. When you go to device manager and IDE Controllers what do you see? There should be a primary and secondary with no yellow ! marks besides them. The Primary should be using IRQ 15 and the secondary IRQ 14. They may be using something else, so let me know what you see.

- go into the bios and make sure that you have both IDE(primary and secondary) are enable, some old PC's have only one enable by default.
- When you turn on your PC, does the bios shows the devices found?
- bootup to a DOS with a win95,98 bootdisk and see if if it get recognized. If you need to create a bootdisk you can get it from www.bootdisk.com, they have plenty to choose from.
- If you can see the CDROM this way the problem resides in windows, go to www.windrivers.com to get some drivers.

let us know.
aa2k

aa2k: This is an external controller card with no IDE connectors on the MB. I suspect there is no option in the BIOS to turn on or off a controller. It may be jumpered on the card, but it's hard to guess until we see what device manager reports. Strange card too .. Promise has zilch on their website about it. I almost thought it didn't exist but I did find some drivers for it on the Internet. We may need an archaeologist to figure this one out.

Why dont you have the CD-R connected to the onboard IDE controller?

Device Manager/CD-ROM Controller shows the CD-R (the one I told it was there..) with the Yellow "!". Under Properties it says the device is Not Present/Not Working, etc. Code 10

The HD controller is a Standard IDE, not enhanced, of course. The BIOS currently shows the HD and both(!) Floppies. On the secondary IDE, it displays options for only other HD's--I have no way of telling it that there's another TYPE of device there.

I guess I'll start fiddling with the jumpers on the DC400 and see what happens...

If device manager is showing a live port for the secondary IDE controller with no conflicts then Windows should detect and install the necessary drivers for a standard IDE/ATAPI CDROM at the very least and hopefully ask you for any drivers that came with the drive Are you saying there is no ! mark next to the secondary IDE controller? I would delete the drive that you manually installed as this is just preventing the detection of the drive that is there. Check "Other Devices" too, as anything in that will prevent further detection. I wouldn't mess with the jumpers because it sounds as if they are correctly set.

Device Manager is showing a yellow ! next to the CD ROM. I attempted to have W95 recognize it on its own; when it did not, I told it what was physically there. It has placed that information there in Device Manager under the CDROM device, however, the Properties for the CD-ROM indicate it's not being recognized.

Device Manager sees no conflicts with the "Hard Disk Controller". It does not distinguish between Primary and Secondary in the Device Manager. There is only one line under that device. Then again, I haven't been able to tell the BIOS that a second device is there because no choices other than various Hard Disks appear when I attempt to modify the BIOS.

It would seem that if I could tell the BIOS that a secondary device existed, I might be in business. It is an AMBIOS 1993 from American Megatrends, which tells me to get support from the manufacturer of the motherboard...

..details as they develop...

well, the utility AM has to ID the motherboard showed neither project tag nor project ID. It did say that it is not an AM motherboard, tho...
[text was edited by author 2001-08-31 16:12:11]

Can you disable the secondary controller in the bios. It may be conflicting with the controller on the card. I had a similar problem years ago when I added a CD that was controlled off a sound card. One of a multimedia kit. Took it to the shop and he fixed it in two minutes. But I can't remember if it was a jumper on the card or the BIOS setting.

The BIOS sees only three devices: the HD, and the two floppies... It does offer me an option to set up a second HD (and ONLY a hard drive--no other device...) So as far as the BIOS knows, there's only those three devices...

You shouldn't install drivers manually in WIN9x. This almost never works. If the device isn't detected then your hardware is not set up properly. As I said before you are best to delete the driver. When you get things working properly you will be prompted for a driver disk or it will install the driver from it's own database.

I think we have a clue as to what your problem is. You say there is no secondary controller present right? This can mean two things. One- your Promise board is not jumpered to enable the 2nd channel, or 2- You have some other device using the IRQ of that channel (probably 14). Lets look at device manager and see what IRQs are being used by what. In device manager there is a radio button to view devices by connection. Click this. Then double-click my computer and it will show you who is using what IRQ. Is anything assigned IRQ 14? If not I would start playing with the board's jumpers. Look for one that is off-set from all the others. This is likely to be a disabled position. You are going to have to try them one by one until you figure out how to enable this channel.

Your other option is to just install the CDROM as a slave on the primary channel. This will work, but will likely sllow down your hard drive. Since I doubt the performance of your system isn't anything to write home about, this might not be a bad option if you just want to get things working, at least until you decide to play with the jumpers on the Promise card.

I don't think playing with the BIOS on your motherboard will help one bit, if you have no on-board controller.

I think I'll play with the jumpers.
There is one that IS off from the others...

I have the jumpers on the CD already set to Slave. It is on the same ribbon cable as the HD. There is no secondary port on the controller card. The only other port is for the floppys.

I have go to go out, but this is news. Don't change the jumpers on the card, as they do appear to be set correctly.

PS: What brand and model hard drive?
[text was edited by author 2001-08-31 19:42:29]

Maxtor HD Model 7345RT

Sort of at a dead end here. I thought there might be different jumpering on the HD for a single drive vs. a master in a dual drive setup but that is not the case. The jumpering is identical for either setup. J20 on the Maxtor should be jumpered as I am sure you will find it... I can't explain why the drive has not been detected. I don't think I have ever seen an IDE controller with one port on it. I guess since your BIOS only supports one drive, there is good reason for that. Your BIOS may be the limitation here, and I'm not sure if there is a work-around. Surely with a 486-66 and a 345mb HD, the effort here has little that can result in the way of a return. You will barely have room for the OS, never mind CD burning software or any other applications you might desire. You might consider using Drivespace but things will get very slow if you do. The motherboard almost certainly does not have a programmable BIOS (unless you own an Eprom burner), so you are stuck with that as well. My advice is give it a good burial.

PS One last shot: Make sure the second drive in the BIOS is set to none, although I don't think this matters in your case.
[text was edited by author 2001-08-31 22:56:26]

The End

Have you edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files load the CD drivers?

Good grief I am having a huge brain fart here......Oh just look here: »www.zdnet.com/products/s ··· ,00.html

Loading the 16 bit DOS drivers might at best give him a compatibility mode CDROM. I guess this is better then nothing. Good idea!

EUREKA! Of Course! That was the ticket! DOS to the rescue! We get quite spoiled with how far both Windows and hardware has come that we've forgotten (I know I have...) that Old Man DOS is still very much alive in that machine...

I knew this would be the place for The Solution!! Thank you ever SO much. You are quite right--the machine isn't much--but then again, it doesn't need to be much for small kids... The little old thing is now humming right along, playing the old games for my grand daughter, Zookeeper, Micky's Reader.

Thank you ALL!!!

Dr. C:\!

said by Dr.Citrus:

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You are quite right--the machine isn't much--but then again, it doesn't need to be much for small kids... The little old thing is now humming right along, playing the old games for my grand daughter, Zookeeper, Micky's Reader.

Thank you ALL!!!

Dr. C:\!

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That's right attitude. You don't need to throw huge iron at a problem that doesn't need it!

Personally I resurrected a P166 running DOS for some other applications I needed, runs fine.

do you plan on burning cd-r's with this burner on that system? man i have enough trouble burning on my 600celeron with 128megs of ram. you sure are a glutton for punishment