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Date: Sat, 22 May 1999 02:55:11 PDT
From: Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To: scoug-help@scoug.com
To: scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject: SCOUG-Help: "Not enough drive letters"

Content Type: text/plain

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Tony Anton wrote:
>
> Two HD's.

IDE, yes?

This is your drive layout, yes?

Drive 1: 8.4 GB
Primary 1: Boot Manager
Primary 2: 636 MB FAT
remainder is free space

Drive 2: 8.4 GB
Primary 1: 636 MB HPFS
Primary 2: Extended Partition
Logical 1: 2 GB FAT
Logical 2: 2 GB FAT
Logical 3: 3.8 GB HPFS

> #2 is another 8.4 with 4 partitions; D: ia 636 primary
> HPFS, E: and F: are both 2 gig FAT partitions, and the
> rest is H:, HPFS.

What happened to drive letter G:?

> OS/2 has Q reserved so that the hard drive, to OS/2 is R.

You've lost me here. :) You're using RESERVEDRIVELETTER in CONFIG.SYS?

> The system was working fine.

The CD-ROM worked fine under OS/2 but never worked in DOS because you'd
never installed the driver, yes?

> Installed the CD-ROM driver in the DOS C:. On boot and
> after autoexec completes, the message in the subject
> line appears. Booting into OS/2 on D: presents no
> problem. FDisk shows everything as it was before.
>
> DOS. on C: sees the second and third partitons on HD 2
> as it should, as D: and E:, but it doesn't show the CD
> ROM. As sutoexec runs, however, the CDROm is detected.
>
> So! What can be done about this?

This MIGHT be really simple.

1) In the DOS CONFIG.SYS file you need to install the driver. The
install line MUST include the /D: parameter, which gives the driver a
"name". (For example, /D:MSCD000)

2) In the DOS AUTOEXEC.BAT file you need to install MSCDEX.EXE
(Microsoft CD Extensions). The install line MUST include the /D:
parameter, and the name must EXACTLY match the name specified in
CONFIG.SYS. (That's how MSCDEX knows what it's supposed to control.)

The following is from my only machine that still has DOS on it. It uses
QEMM instead of the Microsoft memory manager, and LOADHI is the
upper-memory-block loader. The /GS parameter is just a debugging aid
which I've always kept active. This particular machine has a Sony
CD-ROM, and the driver is ATAPI_CD.SYS. What's important is the portion
of each line beginning at "C:\DOS\..."; I've left the leading info just
for reference in case you're loading your drivers high also.

CONFIG.SYS (all one line):
DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /GS:QEMMLDHI C:\DOS\SONY\ATAPI_CD.SYS
/D:MSCD000

AUTOEXEC.BAT (all one line):
C:\QEMM\LOADHI /GS:QEMMLDHI C:\DOS\MSCDEX\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 /L:R
/M:4 /V

There were a number of releases of MSCDEX.EXE. The one on this machine
is version 2.23 with a file size of 25361. (The file date is 01-19-98
but don't go by file date -- some CD-ROM manufacturers change the date
when they copy the file onto their driver disks. Run MSCDEX from the
command line and see what the version is.)

My MSCDEX line includes the /L:R parameter to set the drive letter, the
/M:4 parameter because (according to comments I put in the file) at one
time I had a Toshiba CD-ROM in the machine and the installer set /M
(buffers) to 4, and /V for "verbose mode" so the driver would display
status messages when it loaded. There are a number of other parameters
including /S for Windows For Workgroups and /E for Expanded Memory
buffering (I mention these two because I don't know what you'll be doing
in DOS). There's even /K for Kanji language support.

Hope this helps.

- Peter Skye

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