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pcmica cdrom: no access

9414 Views 85 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  CarlosF, 
JohnJ
Hello All,

I am working on an old laptop. It's a Dell Latitude XPi. The external cdrom (connected via pcmica slot) is a "Slim" drive model number CD224. The dell has no Operating system on it except for basic system files to get to a command prompt. We want to put Windows 98 on it but I don't know how to get the Laptop to see the drive. I have tried boot disks with CD drivers on them but they don't work since it's connected thru the PCMICA slot.

What do I do??!!

Thank you,

John
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Couriant
The PCMCIA drive should have come with the DOS Setup disk that you require. What is the manufacturer of the CD-ROM?
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Couriant
The PCMCIA card should have all the details we need.

But since you purchase the laptop and CD-ROM from the internet (EBAY) then really you should try to contact the person that sold you the laptop to try and find out the manufacturer.

Having said that I will try to find out if there is a file for you to download so you can then boot the CD-ROM in DOS / start up.
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Couriant
Try this. This is from a company that makes PCMCIA CD-ROMs:
Q: CD-ROM Device How to drive PCMCIA CD-ROM Drive under pure MS-DOS mode?

A : There are two ways to solve it.

1.Preparing a boot disk, then editing the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT on the disk..

_______ EDIT CONFIG.SYS:

_______ DEVICE=A:\HIMEM.SYS/TEST:OFF

_______ DEVICE=A:\ARICDI.EXE/P:3 /I:9 /D:MSCD001

(The file ARICDI.EXE can be copied from the original driver disk bundled with the CD-ROM's package. The argument I:9 means IRQ:9. It can be 9,10,11,15) _

______ EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT: _

_______A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001 /L:D _

(The file MSCDEX.EXE is provided by Microsoft. It can be copied from MS-DOS or MS-Windows series.)_

2.Or downloading the file: bootdisk.exe _

Preparing an empty floppy disk, then double click on the file downloaded in hard disk drive. It will unzip automatically to the disk. At last, restarting computer from the disk.
Click to expand...
It may not work since it's specificly for their CD-ROM but hey
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Couriant
Prehaps Dell can shed some light on it. You might want to ask them if the CD-ROM was part of the laptop.
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Couriant
The PCMCIA CD-ROM might have been an earlier model. I know that some that I was selling in the UK supported DOS.

Good luck in finding a CD-ROM. Prehaps Dell has one for you.
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Couriant
Is it small enough to fit on a floppy?
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Couriant
dos codes = commands ;) COPY [source path] [destination path] ie:

COPY A:\*.* C:\

As for the bad floppy, if there was nothing on there that needed salvaging, you should format it again to make sure it's clean before using.
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Couriant
Hold on, bootupdisk? Then you need to exract the files onto a floppy and that's it. Restart with the floppy in and it should work.
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Couriant
Maybe the second boot disc is hungery...

As for first one, the MSCD001 is the CD-ROM Driver for DOS. It's generic so you should be able to fiind it somewhere.
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Couriant
It shouldn't. Most of the CD-ROM drives come from Asia and exported to Europe so I wouldn't be suprised if an UK site has drivers.
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Couriant
Back up for a minute, it's been a while and i'm not going to look through all of the posts :) Is your CD-ROM drive from Dell or from Origin?
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Couriant
You can't use it without Windows installed? Then that defeats the purpose of having it for a machine without a CD-ROM... lol
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