In trying to get a 486 machine in shape for my kids, I formatted the C: Reinstalled Dos and windows. The machine has two hard drives, a 3 1/2 and a cd rom. Windows will not recognize the cd rom. I have C: D: and A: Before the format the CD ROM was D: and the extra hard drive was E: Any suggestions?

do a search on google.com for "Universal Atapi/IDE cd rom driver" you will get a few different ones to choose from...they are just an executable DOS program that implements a driver and adds the line in your autoexec file

Don, Thanks for the tip. I tried the driver and got "no cd found aborting installation" followed by "no valid driver" after the mscdex command line. I went to the config.sys and changed the device letter to E: also did this in the autoexec.batch- That through it for a loop so I changed it back to D: in both places. I know this has something to do with that extra hard drive but I can't figure it. I even unplugged the extra and reinstalled dos and 3.1 thought I might fool it. Just made it say the drive was missing. I think I need to muss with the Bios Settings. Hmmmmmm.......Rob

Sorry Rob, nothing in the BIOS of a 486 has anything to do with CD drives. The CD has to be configured for DOS, then Win3xx will 'see' it. In config.sys, something like: DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDPRO\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:MSCD001 of course, you will likely have a different driver & path - you may need to d/l the appropriate one for your CD, hopefully it would be self-installing. and in autoexec.bat lh c:\dos\MSCDEX.exe /D:MSCD001 .. pretty much, the main thing is that the 'signature' (in this case '/D:MSCD001') matches. hope that helped

this one is from woofs windoze page...i have never seen it not work to set up a cd rom in DOS...just paste the link in your browser and you will see the cdrom driver on his page...http://www.btinternet.com/~woofgbr/

Verify th CD drive id connected to the IDE 0/1 and not the sound card

Sometimes it pays to read a response from different posts .,Thank you Don., you just solved my problem with the information to the site for this download mentioned above .,I downloaded it and your right it installed itself in dos I don't know how but you were right about it never failing you., Just one question how would I get this to show up in windows as an icon I checked in the dos directory and it is showing up as a Samsung Cd Rom but Windows cannot find it unless I have run windows setup all over again or how would I go about doing this .,The green light comes on the Cd rom when it's bootin' up and that's never happened before.,So anyways everythings lookin' good and Thanks one more time Don., B.A.[p/s I think this is a foolproof way of installin' a CD Rom in a hard to get along with computer.............