I'm trying to make an HP M820e CDRW drive accessable in DOS on a Sony VAIO C1VN. The drive is SCSI and comes with a KME (Panasonic) SCSI PCMCIA card. When I load the supplied DOS drivers in config.sys and boot, I get an error on each driver load (3 of them) that "Card Not Inserted" or "Card Information Not Found" or "Card Manager Not Installed." All I can think is that the PCMCIA controller needs its own DOS drivers? It's a Ricoh Rl5C475, according to WinME. I can't find any info on this device anywhere. Anybody have any ideas how to get this all working? Thanks.

Do you have PCMCIA support turned on in the BIOS ?

There is no such specific option in the BIOS. PCMCIA does work in Windows, btw - I'm just trying to get it to work in DOS using the supplied HP drivers. Someone suggested I need a PCMCIA Manager before the drivers. Suggested CardSoft by SystemSoft, since my PC didn't specifically come with a Card & Socket Services disk. CardSoft seems to load ok, but I still get the same errors from the HP drivers. I did notice that the PCMCIA driver from HP is for an Intel PCMCIA chipset, while mine is a Ricoh. However, I did some research and apparently this Ricoh is based on the Intel set and should work. But it simply doesn't. Am I doing something wrong in the config.sys or something inherently DOS related that I just don't understand?

I'm having the same issue with an HP M820 and my vaio z505le. Trying to figure out how to hack the system recovery CD to work. A curse on Sony for being so narrow minded in system recovery, trying to force users to buy their extremely overpriced cdrom.

Cardware 6 for DOS supports the Ricoh controller as well as Texas Instruments controller. I've not tried it yet - but that is in their web page. You can download a trial version at www.tssc.de

I have the same problem as Dennis up there and need to get around the Sony Sys Recovery disk. Damn those suckers for making my life hard. Any other suggestions please post.

HP were no help at all........this works to read/detect pcmcia+CD writer (on my laptop)making a boot-up floppy....copy: Command.com MSCDEX.exe IO.sys MSDOS.sys Autoexec.bat Config.sys kmas365a.sys <* kmasaspa.sys <* kmascda.sys <* (*) from supplied CD writer installation diskette (dos folder) Config.sys needs only these lines: device=a:\kmas365a.sys device=a:\kmasaspa.sys device=a:\kmascda.sys /d:pcmciacd Autoexec.bat only needs this line: MSCDEX /d:pcmciacd /l:E E is your drive letter of your M820e (you can change this if you need to use a different drive letter)