Firstly thanks for the response to my last question on this board - appreciated. I have my laptop and desktop connected through the 9pinDtype serial port (no 25pindtype connctors handy) running interlnk on the laptop and intersvr on the desktop. I can see the floppy drives of each machine I can see the C: of each machine & LPT ports Can interlnk see the cdrom drive and my D: on my desktop machine (win98SE dos) as it doesnt just now ? I have entered lastdrive=z in each config.sys file = nothing ? Do i have to load up a cdrom dos driver - if so where config.sys or dosstart.sys (in the case of w98SE) Why cant I see my D: of my desktop machine?? puzzled and just remembering some old dos stuff (duke nukem through a serial connection was the last time I messed around at this level)...comeback dos :-) any comments/hints/suggestions appreciated.

Interlnk is sensitive to FAT16/FAT32 differences. Your DOS 7 machine can read/write to FAT16 partitions fine but your DOS 6.x machine cannot read any FAT32 partition on your DOS 7 machine. That may be your problem.

I dont think interlink can see the cd-rom as the cd-rom driver has 2 parts to it,one part in config.sys & the other in the autoexec.bat, interlink looks for a conection before the msdex is loaded for the cd-rom,i hope the info was usfull.

Yeah thanks guys --- heres what i done Copied cab files from CDROM to Desktop C: Ran Interlink (laptop as INTERSVR) (desktop as INTERLNK -- added to config.sys of desktop W98 machine... device=c:\pathxxx\interlnk.exe after copying the files from dos6.2 as w98 doesnt have em...also doing this meant I could just boot up into windows enviroment and see the laptop drives as removable drives ***not too sure if this was only possible as I had Iomega guest installed for my Zip drive???) - this let me see all files without problems within W98...GREAT!...., as when it was reversed the laptop would not see the FAT32 and long file extension names of the desktop machine as well as the CDROM Then copied the CAB files to C: of Laptop (deleted Win3.11 for some extra disk space) disconected from intersvr and ran the setup from the HD of the Laptop ***note 147MB of free space needed I was 20MB short so ran with setup /il switch (I think that was the switch setup /? will give you the switches..this let me install without the not enough diskspace crap. Once installed setup Direct Cable Connection (goto www.lpt.com - excellent DCC setup procedures...and www.wown.com for parrallel cable wiring - if you want to make your own) Had to delete CAB files from HD since only 270MB HD & ran Diskspace so now I have W95 and a few dos progs with 340mb free HD space. Once set up with DCC I could map the desktop machines a: C: D: & CDrom drives (for future installs) It was a bit longwinded due to limitations on all fronts both software and hardware but it was worth it...oh..and a cool prog. for checking out your connection speeds & setup cant remember where I got it but the file is DPM211b.exe......... well thats me setup - cheers & beers for all the help I have only one question left that I shall post as a newpost.. Thanks all