Hi all, I've switched to XP and set aside my IBM. It has no burner. I pulled A cd-rom burner from an XP desktop with a fried motherboard. I would like to use this burner to save a huge amount of data and music stored on the 98SE. The burner is a Digital Research model #DRCDRW481848. Manufactured 8/2002. Good or bad, i've never had to install a cd-rom. In research, half the time it's stated no drivers are needed. I'm not sure about that but if needed, I haven't been able to find them. Question is, do I need drivers or not? As well, what's the odds a 2002 model burner can be made to work in a machine built in 1999. Thanks in advance.. Jack..

No drivers needed, just make sure the BIOS recognizes. If the BIOS recognizes the optical drive it will work with the appropriate W98 compatable Burning Software.

"Good or bad, i've never had to install a cd-rom. Shouldn't be much of a problem if you've ever seen the innards of a PC: http://www.fonerbooks.com/r_cd.htm "Question is, do I need drivers or not?" No. No drivers should be needed. "what's the odds a 2002 model burner can be made to work in a machine built in 1999." No reason it shouldn't work in any model or make of PC, provided that it's not defective and you have it set-up correctly (see previous link). What you may need however, is CD-Burning software. Here's a couple of freebies: http://www.deepburner.com/?r=produc... http://infrarecorder.org/?page_id=5 Having used both, they seem to work equally well on XP, but couldn't find any mention of Win98 support...

You need to make sure you have the motherboard chipset drivers installed and you should use an 80 wire IDE cable for best results. Need to have the drives running in a DMA mode.

Thanks guys. Installed windows many times on 9x machines. The boot disks always had 4 cd-rom drivers on it. Maybe for dos ??

The boot disk drivers are to get the CD drive working in order to install Windows. The chipset drivers are important because without them you can get any of the drives to run in any DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode. The drives will run extremely slow without DMA and the burner may not even burn. I can't recall when CDR media went from 650MB to 700MB. Could be around the time that drive was manufactured. If the drive doesn't recognise the media correctly you may need to updat the firmware. Don't worry about it now though.

Yeah, the bootdisk is just dos drivers. You can add an IDE dos driver--oakcdrom.sys on the bootdisk--to config.sys on the hard drive and then mscdex.exe in dosstart.bat to get dos cdrom support when choosing 'restart in msdos mode' when exiting windows.