I currently have the following AMIBIOS mother board. AMI bios 4.21-2.0 40-0101-120193-00101111-080793-SJC491F-H I have installed a 4 Gig hard drive and a 40x spin CDROM. The HDD is found o.k., however the CDROM driver fails to load saing it can't find the CDROM. I have the HDD set as the master and the CDROM set as the slave. I guess I need to get an update to the bios, the question is where do I get it from.

Hey Lou, The old 486's didn't have any kind of cd-rom support in the bios. You need a DOS driver for the cd-rom drive. That's how it was in the old days... No bootable CDs at all.

I don't know why your driver won't recognize your CD-ROM. It might be because your BIOS has to recognize drive D: and there are no cylinder/head/sector perameters for a hard drive. If you had two channels you would not have the problem. To keep the computer one solution is a two channel IDE controller. Several companies made them. A Promise Technologies EIDE PRO is a good one. Does your hard drive cable connect to the motherboard and does the bios autodetect? You have a CD-ROM that can be jumpered slave, so it is a drive for the era that autodetects. Another solution besides a two channer ISA controller, assuming you have to put hard drive parameters into the BIOS manually, is to find an older CD-ROM with its own controller card and install it.

Get a Win98 boot disk and bootup using it. If it doesn't find the CD-ROM and load generic drivers for it, then BIOS or improper cabling should be checked.

Preston may be correct, but Microsoft moves us ahead. So a Windows 98 startup disk probalby won't solve an old computer problem. I don't think IDE drives before EIDE will recognize a CD-ROM jumpered and placed in the Primary (and only) IDE channel. What you probably have is an Enhanced IDE CD-ROM and an older IDE BIOS. Still your controller is in an ISA slot in those old types, so a newer controller is the easiest solution.

I'm having a similar problem. Loaded the cdrom drivers in DOS and it saw the cd okay. Although there is no cdrom bios settings. But after loading windows 95 the cdrom is no longer seen. I can load the drivers from DOS and then when I boot into win95 I see a cdrom icon in the explorer. But when I insert a cd rom there are no files on it. I can't load windows 98 due to the lack of ram in the computer.