I am booting off a Win98SE boot disk with CD-ROM support. In the AUTOEXEC.BAT, the last line reads something like:

%CDROM%:\foo\foo.exe

So it tries to run an executable from the CD-ROM drive when it's done booting.

This all works fine and good if the CD happens to be in the "first" CD-ROM drive in the system. If not, it fails miserably with a CDR101 error - the typical error you would get if trying to access a file from a CD-ROM drive that is currently empty.

I also tried:

if exist d:\foo\foo.exe ...

but the if exist line also displays error CDR101 if there is no disc in the drive.

Does anyone have a reasonable solution to this problem? I just want the boot procedure to automatically run an executable off the CD without any prompts or error messages, and I want it to work regardless of which CD drive it is in.

TIA
harry349

It is some thing to do with setting MASTER/ SLAVE and prymary/ secondary setting of CD rom.
It is hardware connection with ribbon cable to mother board or jumper setting of CDROM.
Check this out.

The best solution is to use a fixed letter for the CD drive that you want to access and put the CD into the drive.

You need a utility that would test whether there is a CD installed, but you would have the same problem if the wrong CD was inserted.

I have a 5 disk CD changer, which depending upon the driver has 5 drive letters, or a single letter. Think of the problem then.

wizard-fred

That's an interesting idea about a utility that tests whether or not a CD is in the drive. If I know there is a CD in the drive, then I'm set. A series of

if exist d:\foo\foo.exe d:\foo\foo.exe

for each drive letter would work fine. Actually I'd probably use a series of gotos so it doesn't try all the other drives after I exit the program but before the batch file completes. Now I just need to find such a utility and see if I can harness its output from a batch file.

I am aware I could change around the order of the drives by physically cabling them differently inside the PC, but I'm trying to avoid that.

Thanks for your input.

FYI - I found just such a utility, and it works great. It's called FindCD.

http://www.nu2.nu/utils/

Thanks again for the input.