DOS won't detect CD-ROM

[cstone10]

I hope someone hear can give me guidance. I have a used IBM Aptiva. After wiping the hard drive and installing DOS 6.22, I attempted to install a CD-ROM driver. The driver is loaded on the hard drive, but when booting I recieve a message- "Drive not detected. Not enough drive letters available."

I have tested the drive itself and it works. I have tested the ribbon cable it also works. The driver itself works as I have used it many times in the past. I'm at a loss. I'm guessing there is something wrong with the boot process but I've gone into system setup and cannot find the source of the problem.

Any guideance would be welcome.

 

[MacFromOK]

This error:

"Not enough drive letters available"

means you'll probably have to use the
LASTDRIVE command in the CONFIG.SYS
file. Normally DOS allows one extra drive
letter, but a zipdrive, etc. will take it if you
have one.

You can use:

LASTDRIVE=Z

until you get things working unless you're
sure of the last drive letter you need.

I guess you know how to load the driver in
the CONFIG.SYS file and to use MSCDEX.EXE
in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file if you've done this
before...

Cheers, Mac

 

[cstone10]

Thanks MacfromOK. That did solve the "not enough drive letters available problem". Unfortunately, I'm still getting a "drive not detected" error during boot-up. It's as if the drive is not plugged in but it is.

Any other ideas?

 

[Lurker1]

Hi cstone10

You might try loading a winows98 setup disk to see if it can find the cdrom drive ok. (start computer with cdrom support) That way you will know if you are just doing something wrong in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

Why are you trying to load DOS anyway?