Zen and the Art of CDROMS

[Dskramer at concentric.net (David Kramer)]

On Sat, 18 Jul 1998, Eric Galliher wrote:
> Hope you all had a great time at the picnic!

I know I did!

> Anyways, like alot of you I just purchased a 
> cable modem, to be installed on Tuesday,

I'm getting mine Friday.

> 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

PROBLEM #1- The Terms of Service agreement states that you need at least a
486/100MHZ.  I'm pretty sure they won't even hook you up with a 386DX/40.
You should call and verify (and possibly panic) Monday.


> 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.

Can you show us the lines added to those files?

> So, two questions-
> 
> 1. Does the controller card jumpers need to be played
> with in order for it to receive information from the 
> CDROM?

No. Back then, the IDE devices were alway hooked up to a separate card,
and that card would always support a primary device and a secondary
device.  I am assuming the hard drive works, ergo the card is functioning.

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

Very few can.  That's what the driver is for.  Just like when you try to
add a hard drive to a computer not designed for one (yes, I used to have
one), you had do load a HD.SYS driver.  

> 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 :)

Also keep in mind they won't hook it up to a computer not running Win95,
WinNT, or MacOS.  So you either need to set up a dual-boot box via LILO
(that's what I'm doing), or have them install it on the Win95 box and move
it yourself after.  If you decide to do that though, you'll have to move
the network card from the Win95 box to the Linux box, because they
configure the modem to just talk to the card with the MAC they give it.



-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                         dskramer at concentric.net
DK KD                                  http://start.at/david.kramer
DKK D  
DK KD  I hope that when I die, it's in my sleep, like my
DDDD   grandfather did. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

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