I just bought a pc from a garage sale. I reformatted the hd (it had winME, but crashed nonstop). I pulled out my old copy of 3.1 and installed it. Now, I realized that I have the 2000 cd and want to upgrade. But, the cd drive doesn't get recognized. I have the MS-DOS 6.22 disks if I need MSCDEX.

So basically my question is, How can I find out the make/model of my internal cd drive and make it run an Windows 3.1?

try the post two down, though the CD drive must be recognised in BIOS, if the bios has CD as first boot device option you can boot from the W2K CD.

A note: This wont fix booting to cdrom issues.

You can do a few things to determine which you need to do, you can remove the cdrom from the computer and on top there should be a sticker printed giving the name and company/model/serial # so on. Or if it is stamped on the front which most are now you can load a generic dos driver. Read on...

If your drive isnt able to be detected in your bios. You are not out of luck. You can do a simple search on any search engine, like www.google.com and search for IDE generic CD-Rom drivers, or download a simple boot disk for win98ME LOL and boot the disk in the drive, this will identify on the screen which driver will most likely load onto your pc. Then goto a search engine and type the driver your looking for. With some experience you can modify a boot disk to load the drivers in dos. I do not have time to explain this tonight it involves moving select files from one floppy to the hard disk, and modifying config.sys and autoexec.bat.

A much simpler solution is to look for an old ATAPI install file, there everywhere online. Ask a few friends near you most people have CD-rom install disks for dos... I know i have about 40 of them lol.

Sincerely,
Joe Christian

If this PC is new enough to consider installing w2000, the CD drive is probably IDE and hopfully conforming close enough to standards that one of the plain vanilla drivers will work.

As mentioned, there are many good bootdisks readily available.

A 98se startup disk from a "KNOWN VIRUS FREE" box should do the trick.

Keep in mind that DOS 6.22 will limit you to 2GB.

Check your email for aoatapi.sys & mscdex.exe

M2

Thanks for all the help, but...

Same topic, new problem.

I downloaded the oak and atapi generic drivers, and the computer recognized and displayed it as a cd-rom drive, but it won't read a cd... Once again any help is greatly appreciated.

Ed,

Assuming the cables are OK and all connections tight, your only smooth move now is to clean the CD drive with a cleaner CD. They have a little brush that cleans the laser lens.

HTH

M2