proprietary soundcard/cd rom

[mritech75]

I am reinstalling windows 98 on an old computer with a proprietary soundcard/cd rom. I wiped the hard drive and prepared it for the os. Its been a while since ive messed with these- not very familiar with dos and editting commands and stuff- do I need drivers just for the sound card for the cd rom to work? Or just a driver for the cd rom? Do they usually come together? Thank you for any input.

[glc]

These are always fun. The easiest way to do it is as follows, and this assumes you have the sound card/CD installation floppy. Boot with a standard 98 startup floppy, and format the hard drive with the /s switch, to make the hard drive bootable. The command is format c: /s . Pull the floppy and boot to the hard drive, you will wind up at a C prompt. Then use the install floppy to set up the sound card interface and CD drivers. Reboot and you should have CD access.

If you don't have the install floppy, the easiest thing to do is disconnect the sound card and CD, and temporarily use a standard IDE cd drive to get Windows installed.

Another option is to make the hard drive bootable, as already indicated. Then remove the hard drive, slave it into another PC, and copy the cab files from the 98 CD onto it. I usually make a folder called \win98, and copy all the files (but not the subfolders) from the \win98 folder on the CD into it. Then you can reinstall the hard drive, boot to it, cd win98, then setup.

It's possible to make a boot floppy with the drivers you need, but I'd have to know the exact sound card and CD drive to advise you specifically.

[mritech75]

Thank you glc for your fast response! I was just looking at it a little closer and it appears to be a controller card? On the back it has a serial and parallel port also rather than the typical sound jacks. Would this card need a driver? Or do I just need a driver for that specific mitsumi cd rom (quad speed)? When I boot up with the win 98 startup-it goes to load the cdrom driver and hangs-my guess is that it is because there are no ide ports but rather that controller card. Oh well, I think I'll try to find the install disk/driver for the cdrom-if no luck- like you said-slave the hard drive to another computer and copy over the cab files. Do I just go from the A prompt and copy *.cab to the corresponding hard drive? ( Not sure how to do this) Thanks!

[glc]

You can do the copy from Windows as I indicated.

I usually make a folder called \win98, and copy all the files (but not the subfolders) from the \win98 folder on the CD into it.

That may be a standard IDE controller, if so, you can just slave the Mitsumi to the hard drive and remove the controller. If the drive has master/slave jumpers, it's IDE, if the jumpers are labeled something else, it's proprietary. As I remember, quad speed Mitsumis were IDE but you need a Mitsumi-specific driver, the generic Oak driver on the 98 bootdisk won't work.