Zen and the Art of CDROMS

[egallih at shell.gis.net (Eric Galliher)]

Discuss...

Hope you all had a great time at the picnic!
Unfortunetly, due to circumstances beyond my
control, I was not able to attend. Next year,
I hope.

Anyways, like alot of you I just purchased a 
cable modem, to be installed on Tuesday,
and am planning(keyword being planning) to use 
an old 386DX/40 running redhat to route off
the connection to my linux box, and the
family win95 computer. To avoid the trouble
of installing linux via NFS or FTP I dug out
an old 8x cdrom from an old 486.(I know, Im using
alot of old equipment here) I am currently attempting 
to connect the IDE ATAPI drive now under dos 6.22 with
limited success.

The way the computer is set up, the hd connects to
an IDE controller card, not an IDE slot on the mother
board. The cables then connects daisy chain like to the 
HD and the CDROM. The HD is set to master and the CD 
is set to slave. The power cords are connected, drivers
installed, and after modifying the config.sys and 
autoexec.bat several times, still nothing works. The
drive is simply not found.

So, two questions-

1. Does the controller card jumpers need to be played
with in order for it to receive information from the 
CDROM?

2. Can the computer simply not handle a CD because
of its age?

I know I could wait for the modem to be installed and
simply install it via nfs or ftp, but this is too much
of a interesting problem to just let go :)

Any advice would be appreciated!

Eric Galliher


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