Serial port CD-ROM driver for DOS

imperor,

Please provide more information about what is going on, when it started, and what you have done so far to troubleshoot the problem.


What system do you have?


What Operating System are you currently running?

It's a Latitude L400 and as I said I'm running DOS 6.2. The HDD was formatted and I want to install Win XP.

It's very basic really, the only thing I need is a driver for the CD-ROM. A bootdisk or just a DOS-driver, doesn't matter as long as it works!

I have external CD-ROM and Floppy connecting to the serial port. The floppy boots and everything but I can't access the CD-ROM at all. Hence, I can't install anything from CD. Which is quite a problem!

The CD-ROM is an internal one from a Latitude C-series. I've tried to find drivers from both you and Samsung who made it but without success. I have also tried a number of generic CD-ROM drivers using mscdex.sys. These won't work for some reason!

I get electricity to the CD-ROM and it even searches the disc with the latest driver i tried but the system still won't install any driver and claims not to find any CD-ROM nor any driver however I do.

It's not a question of BIOS since I've tried all combinations of Boot-sequences and upgraded the entire BIOS as well.

 

Ted

Imperor,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

It's a Latitude L400 and as I said I'm running DOS 6.2. The HDD was formatted and I want to install Win XP.
It's very basic really, the only thing I need is a driver for the CD-ROM. A bootdisk or just a DOS-driver, doesn't matter as long as it works!

I have external CD-ROM and Floppy connecting to the serial port. The floppy boots and everything but I can't access the CD-ROM at all. Hence, I can't install anything from CD. Which is quite a problem!
The system does not have a serial port, are you talking about the media bay port or do you have the system docked?

The CD-ROM is an internal one from a Latitude C-series. I've tried to find drivers from both you and Samsung who made it but without success. I have also tried a number of generic CD-ROM drivers using mscdex.sys. These won't work for some reason!
Dell does not have dos drivers to access the cdrom in dos.
But, the drive is fully bootable in dos so if you have a bootable Win98 or WinXP cd, you should be able
to boot to such a cd. All you have to do is verify that the hardware is working.
Then set your bios options to boot to the CDROM first. Then use a "known" bootable cd like WinXP.

I get electricity to the CD-ROM and it even searches the disc with the latest driver i tried but the system still won't install any driver and claims not to find any CD-ROM nor any driver however I do.

You could have a bad cable, bad cdrom drive, or bad media sleeve.
Try another cable, a different drive, or different media sleeve.
If you need to purchase any parts you can do so from Dell Spare parts.
Dell Spare Parts Phone# 800-372-3355 Ext:6-9937
Part#.........Description:
103PE.........Data cable (connects Media Bay to system)
10NRN.........Cable, Data, External, Multi-Media, Portable
536EH.........Media Bay Module sleeve

Additional info:
External Media Bay
The external media Bay sleeve allows Latitude LS removable storage devices ("C" series modules) to be used with the L400 and 2000 systems. The sleeve accepts the floppy drive, secondary Hard Drive, LS-120, Zip250, CD-ROM, CD-RW or DVD-ROM, and attaches to the system via a special media bay cable (the same cable used for the LS). The connector for the cable is located on the back of the system.
The floppy drive can also be used via the optional parallel port cable, but none of the other devices will work unless they are used in the external media sleeve.

OK.

 Thank you! So it's an external Media Bay I need. Only took you ten weeks and an angry message to get the info...

Could a USB-CD do it? There are a lot of drivers around for that but since your recommendation is to buy a lot of expensive stuff I guess it won't work. Because if it did you would have told me, right?

It's a bit wierd though that I can get the CD to start with the Parallel port (which is what I wrongfully called the Serial port before) cable when I need a Media Bay to use it... How is it that you need it for all other drives but the Floppy?

I'd be thankful for a quicker answer this time... I'm sorry if I'm being rude, but I have been trying to get this computer to work for months now and I have asked you for help several times and gotten none until now! I got it to use it, not to look at, even though it looks pretty good! ;-)

Imperor

Imperor,

Could a USB-CD do it? There are a lot of drivers around for that but since your recommendation is to buy a lot of expensive stuff I guess it won't work. Because if it did you would have told me, right?
Your system bios does not support booting to a USB external drive, so a USB external CDROM drive
will not work as a bootable drive.

It's a bit wierd though that I can get the CD to start with the Parallel port (which is what I wrongfully called the Serial port before) cable when I need a Media Bay to use it... How is it that you need it for all other drives but the Floppy?
The parallel port cable should work with both your floppy and CDROM drive.
You can verify this by connecting the drive and booting to Windows.
If the drive works, either floppy or cdrom, then you know the drive and cable are fine.
The "media sleeve" is recommended by Dell engineering, but other customers have reported that you
don't need the media sleeve and you only need the cable. Unfortunately I cannot verify this.
But again, connect your cdrom to the system using the parallel port cable. If the drive works
in Windows then that means you do not need the media sleeve.
The problem as you have noticed is that you may not have the correct drivers to use the cdrom in
dos. As I stated earlier, Dell does not have specific dos drivers for this drive and dos.
You can try booting to a bootable cd like Windows98. Once you are at a dos prompt, take out the
Win98 cd and put in the data cd you want to access in dos.