Sony CD Rom 'Driver'?!

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.gateway2000 (More info?)

I hauled out my old P133 machine the other night. It used to contain Win98
and stuff, but as it wouldn't read any CDs I put into the 8x speed CD Rom
Drive. I instantly thought the drive was gone, and in my frustration, I
formatted the hard drive and thought "stuff it!". Then tonight, I did a
search for the Sony CDU331 CD Rom Drive as I wondered how much it would cost
for a replacement, but instead of finding the drive....'I found the driver!
I didn't know that these things used their own drivers...'do they? I always
thought that the driver for the CD Rom Drive was on the Win98 boot-disk
which I had made. I tried to install Win98 again booting from the floppy
bootdisk, but although I selected the option to install the CD Rom support,
the PC is still not recognising my Win98 CD, or any other CD for that
matter. I took the drive out, checked all cables and replaced it. I've
checked the bios and it's there. Also, when Win98 'was' on the PC, it showed
the drive in Device Manager and named it correctly. The drive spins, but I
am told repeatedly that "there is no readable media". Is my drive history?
Or have I fluffed something? Anyway, I downloaded the driver for it from a
place called windrivers or something like that. It says it's a Dos driver as
well as a Windows driver in a Winzip file, but I haven't a clue what to do
with it as I have formatted the hard drive. Any help/advice here greatly
appreciated.
Cheers.
Eos.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.gateway2000 (More info?)

The Sony CDU331 is an IDE/ATAPI drive which conforms to industry standards. To
use it in the DOS world, device drivers are required along with the MSCDEX.EXE,
the Micro$oft CD-ROM Extensions to DOS. The Windows 98 install floppy has the
necessary DOS stuff in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to access the CD-ROM drive
leading to the installation of Windows.

From what you described, I will guess that the drive has failed. Replacements
are cheap and easy, given that CD-RW drives have taken over the market.

.... Ben Myers

On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:05:31 GMT, "Eos" <FreeSoft@(SkipTheBrakets)Tiscali.co.uk>
wrote:

>I hauled out my old P133 machine the other night. It used to contain Win98
>and stuff, but as it wouldn't read any CDs I put into the 8x speed CD Rom
>Drive. I instantly thought the drive was gone, and in my frustration, I
>formatted the hard drive and thought "stuff it!". Then tonight, I did a
>search for the Sony CDU331 CD Rom Drive as I wondered how much it would cost
>for a replacement, but instead of finding the drive....'I found the driver!
>I didn't know that these things used their own drivers...'do they? I always
>thought that the driver for the CD Rom Drive was on the Win98 boot-disk
>which I had made. I tried to install Win98 again booting from the floppy
>bootdisk, but although I selected the option to install the CD Rom support,
>the PC is still not recognising my Win98 CD, or any other CD for that
>matter. I took the drive out, checked all cables and replaced it. I've
>checked the bios and it's there. Also, when Win98 'was' on the PC, it showed
>the drive in Device Manager and named it correctly. The drive spins, but I
>am told repeatedly that "there is no readable media". Is my drive history?
>Or have I fluffed something? Anyway, I downloaded the driver for it from a
>place called windrivers or something like that. It says it's a Dos driver as
>well as a Windows driver in a Winzip file, but I haven't a clue what to do
>with it as I have formatted the hard drive. Any help/advice here greatly
>appreciated.
>Cheers.
>Eos.
>
>
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.gateway2000 (More info?)

Drive is dead like Mr. Ben says, but for future reference, whenever media is
not being read, the issue is almost NEVER a driver issue. If the drive
itself is not recognized, could be a driver (or related software) issue.
Even then, the most prudent course of action would not be to format the HD
and reinstall windows.