#Can't Get NEC 74 Working
19 messages in this thread
Just spent most of the night trying to get a new NEC 74 going to no avail.
Using a standard 486-33 with an OPTI chipset. Drive is running off a PAS16
SCSI connection with flat 50 pin ribbon cable. Cable and power are
connected correctly. Loading the device driver in config.sys before QEMM
and using the default settings. Any help would be appreciated. At boot the
device driver says there is no CD-ROM present.
— Mike Amland
My apologoes for a typo on prior message. The drive is the model 84
internalone.
— Mike Amland
In other places I have heard of problems with using shadow ram for the
bios. This seems to conflict with several different SCSI CD-ROM drives.
Also do you have the most current version of the drivers. You might try
the Multi-Ven forum (GO MULTIVEN) since this is where Media Visison is
located. They offer support for your PAS16 card adn Trantor Systems who
writes the scsi drivers is avaible in this forum or that forum.
Have you made sure your devices are properly terminated on the SCSI bus?
Thanks for the tips, I have tried all sorts of shadowing options including
turning everything off. Did get the latest drivers from Mediavision in
Multiven. As for terminating the SCSI bus, I am using the drive as is out
of the box which I believe is terminated.
— Mike Amland
You will know if it is terminated if you have the plug on other port for 74
and block or jumper for 84 (see manual)
Things to check
SCSI ID s/b =0 or =1
EMM statement should exclude last of three VGA areas and SCSI card address
try loading MSCDEX low
make sure the paramters for mscdex match driver statement in autoexec.bat
(it's not exactly logical) /l: is drive letter /m: is buffers /d: is device
name "/d:neccd"
make sure your lastdrive= is greate than cdrom drive letter
Call nec at 1800 388 8888 they are generally excellent on the phone.
It's only easy for some people. Take heart – they do work wonderfully once
set up. And you feel great having conquered the new tech
What is your card IRQ and address set to? What's available (IRQ and
addresses) on your motherborad. I think this might help eliminate this as a
problem.
Paul, the card IRQ and DMA settings are only using available specs and runs
the audio portion of the PAS16 without problem.
— Mike Amland
This may be a stupid question, but do you have MSCDEX loaded in your
autoexec.bat? Does the drive light flash on POST?
-Bill
I did have the driver in autoexec, but never got past the error message in
loading the .sys driver at config.sys and no, the busy light does not flash
at post, regardless of whether or not I tell my BIOS to check floppy drives
at boot up. Thanks.
— Mike Amland
The doc's for my PAS 16 say it doesn't support the NEC 74. Not sure if
that is true, or just smoke and mirrors. I hope you're not barking up the
wrong tree here….
-Bill
My apologies for the message header Bill — its an CDR-84.
— Mike Amland
If I recall from the 'fun' times I had getting a mismatched controller
and CD-ROM going, the CD-ROM LED *always* flashed on POST, even without
MSCDEX, even when the controller couldn't see the drive. Hopefully you've
got hardware problems- have you tried swapping drive, and controller???
-Bill
Bill, the drive light will only flash on the NEC after the .sys driver
finds and initializes the drive. I was finally able to get it going without
any hardware changes after discovering that NEC and MediaVision refuse to
post the driver set for the PAS16/NEC combo anywhere and it must be bought
through MV — who coincidentally have *none* in stock!! Finally found a
source though and *magic* it works. MV and NEC sure put their customers
through a whole lot of uneeded aggravation to get an otherwise simple setup
operating. Posting the right driver through CIS and their *own* BBS's would
seem to be simple enough — but….
– Mike Amland
Mike, Media Vision licenses the CD-ROM driver from Trantor and they can not
make it publicly available as they pay on a per-copy basis. Use of the
driver without paying either Media Vision or Trantor for it is a violation
of copyright. I feel for you and probably would have borrowed one from a
friend to get things going too, but you should still order the driver kit
from Media Vision. No, I don't work for Trantor or Media Vision.
Bruce, I did indeed buy the driver/cable kit. Problem is that they do not
have any in stock and won't for another 7-10 days. As for the public
availability of the drivers, the NEC drivers are no different in that
respect from any of the other drivers which *are* made available through
their online services. Fact is that its of no use without the drive and the
cost is included in their pricing for the board/drives not in the add-on
kit.
Michael, I had to disable the 16k region of BIOS ram via my setup program.
I believe the adress started at c000. I have an AMI bios. After disabling
this small portion of shadow ram, I no longer had this problem.
-Wil
Wil, I have disabled all the shadowing regions via AMI BIOS and no success.
Thanks though.
— Mike Amland
Michael, you're not going to give up that easy are you? Do you have a
hardware cache? If so disable that. Do you have any other boards in your
system that might be knocking heads with your CD-ROM board? If so take them
out temporarily. If I were you, I would have the minimum amount of hardware
on my motherboard to boot up off of your hard disk. This means your
controller card for your hard/floppy disk, and your video card. If you have
any separate multi-IO cards or sound cards or hand scanner cards,
temporarily take them out. Let me know how it's going.
-Wil
What me? Give up without a fight — never!! Believe me, I wish it were so
simple, but have to suspect a bad drive at this point. I have indeed done
a 'strip' of system boards, disabled everything (including the microwave,
you never know!) and still no luck! Thanks.
— Mike Amland