Byron:

With some CDROM drivers requiring the I/O address and IRQ info, you must provide these values for the IDE interface in a switch in the CDROM device driver statement in CONFIG.SYS. That's so the driver will know which IDE device to query and load support for.

For example, if your CDROM is on the Secondary IDE controller, this would be IRQ 15. The I/O port address will tell the driver whether it is the Master or Slave device.

An IDE interface on the Sound Card complicates matters, so you will need to determine the IRQ and I/O port for the onboard interface. Some cards require a software utility to enable the IDE port, and select settings.

If you cannot discern the card's settings, try plugging the CDROM drive into a standard IDE port.  Or you can try the brute force method of trying each and every IRQ and I/O port settings for Primary, Secondary and Tertiary IDE ports, master/slave, for the sound card.

Good luck,

John Chin

> From: Byron Wolter <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: [PCBUILD] proprietary CDRom
>
> I need help.  Have some Packard Bell computers that use a proprietary CD-ROM
> controller in conjunction with a sound card.  The CD-ROM drive is a 563 and
> most of the computers have a sound card/CD interface card labeled Packard
> Bell with a Crystal chipset.  The other has an AZT sound card chipset.
>
> Someone earlier told me to download the dos563.exe file.  I did but, I can't
> get to work to build the config.sys and autoexec.bat because it asks for the
> I/O address and the IRQ of the card.  I don't know and there's nothing on
> the card to indicate this.  The only thing on the cards is the 220 vs. 240
> I/O for the sound portion.  And, I can't remember what the possible I/Os
> would be.  Can anyone help me out on this?  I am clueless.
>
> Byron Wolter

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