Karen: Do you know which of the two CD-ROM drivers you are having trouble with?
It takes two drivers to install a CD in DOS. One is the hardware-specific driver that may come with the CD hardware itself, but there are also several of them (like OAKCDROM.SYS) that will work with different hardware if they are "standard" enough (early CD hardware was not standard at all). The "output" of this driver is a character device that has a name, and all this driver does is provide access to the sectors on the disk -- it doesn't actually "understand" what the data is (e.g., whether it is a music CD or a data CD or something else). The second driver is usually MSCDEX, but there are also several clones of MSCDEX (e.g., SHSUCDX and NWCDEX). That driver "interfaces" with the first driver (you must tell MSCDEX what the name of the first driver is) and the "output" is a drive letter (a block device instead of a character device) that DOS can use (like D:) to access the files. Just like with floppies and hard drives where you can have different kinds of formatting (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, HPFS, etc.), you can also have different kinds of formatting on CDs, DVDs, and BDs. The second driver is the one that needs to "understand" the different kinds of formatting to be able to turn it into a drive letter. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
