On 20 Jan 99, at 14:13, Dave Perry wrote:

> Heres one for 50 points.
>
> I have just partitioned and formatted a 512mb hard drive ready for
> Win95 OSR2. I copied across the CD rom drivers to the hard drive so
> that I could get the CD rom going. And then came the problem ...
> after rebooting I get a message quoting the CDrom device line from
> autoexec.bat and a statement that there are no device drivers loaded
> for the cdrom. The Cd rom is made by Creative. It is connected to the
> sound card.What can I do next? The installation of the device drivers
> goes fine everytime except when I go to boot up and I get the
> annoying message.

  Real-mode CD-ROM drivers come in two parts.  The upper-level part is
MSCDEX.EXE, supplied with the OS and loaded by a line in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
  The lower-level part is generally a .SYS file, loaded by a DEVICE=
line in CONFIG.SYS.  Traditionally it was specific to a single model of
drive, but there are now generic versions for any ATAPI drive.

  Assuming that you've got both pieces, and are loading them correctly,
they still need to talk to one another.  The low-level piece installs
an entry in an internal "device list" (which includes names like "COM1"
and "LPT2"), and MSCDEX finds it by searching in that list.
  MSCDEX is told what name to look for by the /D:name option.  Most
modern low-level CD-ROM drivers allow you to *set* the device name by a
similar /D:name option, but some older drivers contained the name hard-
coded.

  So, what could cause a "no drivers loaded" message in AUTOEXEC.BAT?
I'd guess that MSCDEX cannot find the lower-level driver in the device
list, probably because it isn't looking for it under the device name
it's actually using.  This could be because no /D parameter was
supplied, or because the /D parameters of the two driver pieces don't
match -- there are several possibilities which could all lead to this
message.


David G

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