Anyone knows how to install a cd drive into an old IBM 486. It has a sb16 isa soundcard, and I'm not quite sure where to plug the ide cable, and how to place the jumpers. There's one free ide slot on the motherboard, and two on the soundcard. I've tried all of them, and the cd drive does something when plugged into the other of the souncard's slots or to the one on the motherboard. When plugged to the other of the soundcard's slots, nothing happens. In either of the two first situations, the machine tells me that the "cd drive is not ready" or something, and it won't work. I've installed DOS 6.22 and the correct (as close as I could find)creative cd drivers, but this doesn't help. I suppose the drive itself is broken, but anyway, how should the ide cable and the jumpers be set? There are no other devices on the same ide cable. Thanks.

Hi,Iwould use the secondary IDE slot on the motherboard.Set jumper on the drive to master.Make sure the red stripe on the cable matches up to pin one on the drive and the board. Good luck.

Negative on that. This CD ROM drive is back from the days when multimedia bundle is popular(CD Rom drive, sound card, microphone, speaker, and bunch of sampler CD in one box) when buying separate CD Rom drive was almost impractical. I will bet that this is a quad speed CD drive. Those are also the days when controllers are plug-in type and not onboard. These drives are proprietary and will not work normally on onboard controllers. There are reported complaints that SCSI and IDE CD drive will not function when plugged in to any controller other than the sound card included. Old 486 schoolers never had a problem since onboard controllers are not popular back then. What you need to do is to disable your onboard and use the one in the soundcard. You have to install the driver that came with the soundcard. Even Win95 and later PnP OS will not detect it, again it's proprietary. If you're using Windows 95 and later OS, it will still work, but don't be surprised to see that it is running under DOS compatibility mode. Most of them are not supported by Windows 95 anymore.

You may run into problems if the cd drive speed is greater than around 20x. This is because the drive itself could be too fast for the 486. In addition to the ide cable, there is a normally a small (3 wire?) audio cable that connects from the cd drive to the sound card. I have not had problems using the ide controller when installing cd drives on 486's. Good luck - keep us posted. Good

Thanks for the help guys. But I still couldn't get it to work. I tried again and plugged the ide cable to the slot on the soundcard that says "creative/panasonic drive". The specific error message given when DOS starts: "if CD-ROM drive is not ready, please set or turn on." Now, I noticed also that when the ide cable is in place, the sound card doesn't work complaining "Wrong base I/O address or audio card is not detected at 220". None of the other I/O address options work. When I unplug the ide cable, the sound card works again. Then I tried with an Asus 40x drive, and this time the startup halted. I tried again with the old cd drive (which is 2x btw) and reinstalled the drivers for both cd drive and the sound card. This got me nowhere. I found an update to the driver (sbcd.sys, version 4.22 apparently), and the bootup error message changed slightly: "SBCD001: Interface board or CD_ROM drive is not ready". I don't have any original driver disks and I couldn't find any other drivers that would match this cd drive (model CD-220E). Any other solutions?