#Getting a CD-Rom to work
2 messages in this thread
I have purchased (through mail order) what seems to be a relabeled Toshiba
XM-3401b (ext.) CD-Rom drive from a supposedly and large reputable company. It
came with minimal documentation and a hand-lettered and woefully inadequate
floppy disk with outdated drivers. After much effort my Gateway2000 DX2-50 (8
Mb of RAM) now recognizes the existence of the CD-Rom Drive on D:. It will
display the directory contents and read a text file from D: with agonizing
slowness.
However, it will not run setup.exe or any exe. file from three separate
disks. I have tried loading from RUN under Program Manger, from File Manger,
and from D:. In every case either the message comes up "insufficient memory"
or the screen goes blank and a white cursor appears. The computer is hung up
and needs to be powered up to be able to use again. I am running Norton
Desktop for Windows, I have 2 Mb in the SmartDrive Cache. I have two floppy
drives and a hard disk and an internal tape backup (Colorado Memory Systems –
??? also D: Drive ???). Can anyone help? Thank You. JB
Make sure you've got mscdex and other drivers loaded high successfully; if
they're hogging conventional memory, CD's and DOS programs under Windows may
tank, giving symptoms similar to those you're experiencing. Some programs,
games especially, need 550K or more free to run, or they may not run under
windows at all. And make sure that both drivers, .sys and mscdex are, indeed,
loaded at all. Failure of the .sys to load properly will also cause the drive
to fail to execute programs but permit some file reads.
Also, make sure that you don't have a disk-doubling program such as Stacker or
DOS's DoubleSpace that is using C: *and* D: (they create a "stacked" volume
that uses the extra drive letter) and that your CDROM is also trying to use D:
whilst DOS thinks it then has 2 D:s.
Hope it helps!