[vox-tech] Accessing cdrom from Tom's Root Boot

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Thu 30 Dec 04,  2:06 PM, Richard S. Crawford <rscrawford at mossroot.com> said:
> On Thursday 30 December 2004 13:17, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> > Oh, oops.  Let me see if I have this straight.  You booted the operating
> > system off the cdrom drive.  In other words, the kernel was read off a CD,
> > and still, the cdrom drive "isn't detected"?
> 
> Sorry, I was unclear.  Nope, I'm using Tom's Root Boot on a floppy.  The 
> computer's set to boot from the CD-ROM drive first, but I figured it wasn't 
> since there was nothing in the CD-ROM to boot from.
> 
> Going through the BIOS, I find no option to automatically detect all IDE 
> drives.  When I go to "device list", though, the CD-ROM drive does not show 
> up; and I don't see the CD ROM drive listed in the list of IDE devices that 
> pop up at the end of the boot sequence before LILO kicks in.  So I'm guessing 
> that the CD-ROM drive is not being detected by the system for some reason.
> 
> Weird.  I'm going to contact the sysadmin who maintained this computer at the 
> library and see if he had disabled the CD-ROM drive for some reason.
 
Agreed: wierd.  IDE (at this level) is usually foolproof.  I can't think of
any way to disable a cdrom.

One last thing you might want to try: press the "open door" button (or if
the cdrom has a light, see if the light goes on) when the system turns on.
Honestly, this sounds like the cdrom drive isn't getting power.

Actually, one more thing pops to mind.  Maybe this used to be a SCSI only
system, so BIOS was set to reserve IRQ 14/15?  But if this were the case,
I'd think that BIOS would still report the hardware.  Maybe I'm wrong.  I've
never really understood the interplay between BIOS and the PC very well.
It's still a very mysterious thing to me.

Pete

-- 
The mathematics of physics has become ever more abstract, rather than more
complicated.  The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated.
He also appears to like group theory.  --  Tony Zee's "Fearful Symmetry"

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