hey, i have an old AST advantage 486/33 system. i manually put in a cd-rom (ide) but i couldnt get past the bios startup .... it sees the cd-rom as a hard drive, there is no way to disable that, and it says 'invalid ide drive', tho the drive werks fine on other computers. It also only recognizes the hard drive it came with, so i cant upgrade space either. I had win 95 on it, and i put in a Panasonic 2x (or 1x, i dunno i think 2x) MKE cd-rom in and it werked, because it was on a special cd-drom controller card and i installed that in win 95. It wouldnt werk in dos, and i wanted 3.1. No luck, couldnt get the cd-rom card or the cd-rom werking. i now want to make the pc run like a server (not a real server, just to route to a pc that is 10 feet away. i want to make the os either: linux, NT 3.1, nt 3.5, wfwkgps 3.11, dos, 3.1, or sumtin like that. is there a boot disk i can use to recognize this cd-rom when i boot up? or can i get the drivers (i tried windrivers, no luck) please help!!!

I really think that you should be able to change hard drives in your BIOS setup in a 486 33. I have not seen a 486 or 386, for that matter, that only recognized one hard drive. It is possible that your BIOS can't auto-identify a different hard drive so you may have to manually change the type to USER, then type in HEADS, CYLS, etc. I am confused about one thing here, you are calling the drive an IDE CD-ROM drive which you used before with a controller card in Win 95 and now you are using without the controller card? If you are talking about the same CD-ROM drive, you have to use the controller card for DOS and Win 3.1. It may have 40 pins on the ribbon cable but it is a proprietary CD-ROM drive that needs the controller card. The DOS drivers for all the PANASONIC/MATSHUS HITA-KOTOBUKI CD-ROM drives are readily available at www.driverguide.com or ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/Drivers/OEM-CDROM/ or ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/Drivers/CDROM/ It is a little tricky figuring out which CD-ROM driver you need from those FTP sites but they are all there. What is the model number of your CD-ROM drive?

That should be Matsushi ta. Have to put in a space or the word gets censored.

i am using the one with the controller card..... the controller card says "laser-rom" and the model number on the CDrom is cr-562-b.

486 BIOS's won't detect CD-ROM drives - at least, to the best of my knowlege. CD-ROMs Do Not Have Cylinders etc (?!!) If you're running Win9x, you have to set up the CD-ROM in DOS as well to use it in DOS. Hope this helps a bit, matt - the rest of your post is somewhat unclear.

jboy, Yes I realize that CD-ROM drives don't have Cylinders, heads etc. That was in reference to Matt saying that he couldn't use any hard drive other than the one that came with the computer.!!??!!?? Matt, Try this file; ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/Drivers/OEM-CDROM/56X_DOS.EXE Good luck

gotcha... .. it IS a confusing post to read... at least for me.