I have a Toshiba Portege 3010CT. It has a floppy drive and I have found a PCMCIA CD-ROM to accompany it. The notebook was running ME, ran into boot problems. The system will not boot independently (I use a boot disk) and ME will not load. I do not have a copy of ME, but I have a Win 98SE copy I want to get onto the notebook. So I have to access the Windows 98 CD from DOS. I installed the PCMCIA driver on the notebook and fixed the bootdisk so it loads the driver. On boot the drive is recognized and I can access drive D. However, I cannot perform any system commands with the drive - all I get is "invalid media type a/r/f." Is there a way I can make DOS recognize iso-9660 file systems? Shouldn't the driver be doing this already?

First, what are you booting with, such as Dos 6xx? Have you tried reading a FACTORY CD such as a W9x CD? By this I mean one that is not a burned copy? Some of my old drives will not reliably read burned CD's, and when you mention the iso type, it suggests to me that you are using a burned copy.

I get a dos prompt using a Win98SE boot disk (so dos 7.0/7.1). The only cd I need to read is a factory cd (a very legal copy of Win98SE). Good idea though - I have horrible problems using burned cd's across windows platforms (just have to always specify joliet for the file system). I believe I know the problem: dos cannot identify the filesystem of cd's. It knows there is a device there, and it supplies the device a drive letter. I have not accessed a cd-rom drive from dis since I used an old 386DX. I cannot remember the details. Thanks for the input.

You need to load mscdex.exe in order to access the CD-ROM, assuming you have Card Services and the driver for the CD correctly loaded. the format is: mscdex /d:drivername replace drivername with the driver name that your config.sys is using to load the CD ROM driver. For instance, If your config.sys had this line: device=oakcdrom.sys /d:cdrom you would load the cdrom driver with this command: mscdex /d:cdrom You can either plug this into your autoexec.bat or type it manually from a command line. HTH, Michael