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First there was the LaserVision Disc which measured 12" in diameter. We could now (1973) watch home movies from a prerecorded digital signal. The quality was better than the opposition, Betamax and VHS tape. However the tape players unlike the Disc could also record from the television and therefore became the players of choice.

    All was not lost however as a smaller, 12 cm version of the Disk could be used to record digital music. In 1983 the Compact Disk or CD was born. Later still someone had the bright idea that computer data could be stored on the same Disc. The CD-Read Only Memory or CD-ROM was born.

    Early drives were not of a standard format. The SCSI interface was probably the easiest to install but was as usual expensive. Some 486 Motherboards had several connection sockets for various drives so one had to buy a compatible drive. The sockets sometimes were the same size as another manufacturer's drive but would still not be compatible. A good early solution was to bundle the CD-ROM drive with a Sound Card which had a CD-ROM interface which was compatible with this drive. This was a good solution at the time but a universal standard was needed. Enter the IDE CD-ROM drive. On a 486 motherboard with only one IDE socket one Hard Drive and one CD-ROM drive could be fitted and that was it. Enter the Pentium with Motherboards with two IDE sockets as standard. Up to four IDE devices supported. However going back to the 486 that you might be trying to rebuild, the dedicated sound card options would allow you to have two hard drives fitted. The downside is that you are limited to the slow 2X performance of these early drives. Nor were they able to read multi session disks. Some multi media programs would not run correctly either.

    The LaserVision Disk with its larger capacity nearly made a comeback as a storage device. The LVD-ROM or D-ROM? The DVD-ROM put paid to that as it was originally designed to do the same thing. Hold an entire feature length movie on one disk.

    CD-Recordable or CD-R were a boon to the home PC for backing up data. The early ones were WORMS, Write Once Read Many Times. This meant that you either accumulated enough data to fill a disk or you have one disk with only a small amount of data on it. As the name implies you could only write to the disk once. As blanks were expensive then something better was required. The Multi Session Burner could write to the disk many times until it was full but used up 20 MB for each session to write the Table of Contents. Still with 650 MB of disk space this was fine. The big BUT was that if such a disk were inserted into another PC the CD-ROM drive had to be able to read a Multi Session Disk. As a rough rule of thumb if the drive is a 4X or greater it will read Multi Session. If it does not state the speed on the front of the drive you can assume that it is an old non IDE drive. These old drives sometimes have a cable which will fit into an IDE socket but are not compatible so be warned. I have wasted a lot of time with some of these under the mistaken impression that it was an IDE when it wasn't.

    So my advice is use an IDE drive. Brand new standard CD-ROM drives are very cheap if you can't get hold of one otherwise. If you have to have more than one Hard Drive, get a bigger one instead and put two partitions on it.

    OK you have your old PC working except that the CD-ROM doesn't work. If you are going to use Windows 95 or higher there is no problem as they have their own CD drivers. Windows 3.1 SHOULD be OK but DOS will definitely need additional drivers. http://www.oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/index.htm is a good place to download CD-ROM drivers or you could try what I have done.

    A Windows 98 Start-Up disk seems to be able to start any PC and support any IDE CD-ROM drive. This can be generated from a system running Windows 98 by going to Control Panel and selecting "Add/Remove Programs" , click on the "Start-Up Disk" tab, insert a floppy disk and click "Create".

    Boot-up from this floppy even if you have no intention of installing W98 on this system. We only want to copy the CD-ROM drivers. Choose "Yes" to "Do you wish to enable CD-ROM support". Check that the CD-ROM drive does work by logging on to it. Insert any CD and do a DIR command. Loads of files? Excellent, we can proceed.

    1.    Create a Directory called CDROM
        i.e. At the C:\> type MD CDROM
    2.   Copy OAKCDROM.SYS from the A: drive and MSCDEX.EXE from the RAM drive into the C:\CDROM directory
        i.e. A:\COPY OAK*.* C:\CDROM
               E:\COPY MSCD*.* C:\CDROM (The RAM drive letter might not be E:)

If you are only running DOS, copy the MSCDEX.EXE into the DOS directory.

3. Remove floppy and re-boot. If you haven't run MEMMAKER (DOS memory optimization program) now would be a good time.

    4.    Edit Autoexec.bat
            Insert the line "LH /L:1,27952 C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:MSCD00"
            Edit Config.sys
            Make sure the LASTDRIVE=G (for example) has a drive letter two higher than the last drive you have. e.g. 1 HDD=C, plus 1 CD-ROM=D therefore LASTDRIVE=F. You could of course just stick LASTDRIVE=Z but that would use up resources unnecessarily.
            Insert the line "DEVICEHIGH =C:\CDROM\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001 [/P:168,10] [/L:US]" somewhere after the lines that have HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE

    5.    Re-boot and that should be it. If you now decide to install Windows 3.1 it will also add lines to your Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. You may find that DOS has slowed down or some programs won't run, giving a "not enough memory" message.
    Do a "MEM" at the DOS prompt. Look at the "Largest executable Program size" line. Ideally it should give at least 580K. If it is lower Windows has effectively loaded the drivers twice.
    Edit the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys so that the relevant lines look something like the ones below.

rem LH C:\WINDOWS\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:MSCD001 /V /L:E /M:15
LH /L:1,27952 C:\WINDOWS\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:MSCD001
rem LH /L:1,27952 C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:MSCD001

rem DEVICEHIGH /L:1,22896 =C:\CDROM\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001 /V
DEVICEHIGH =C:\CDROM\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001 [/P:168,10] [/L:US]

Adding the "rem" at the beginning turns the line into a "Remark" which will not be executed. Once you are certain that it is no longer needed then the line can be deleted. However if you wish to re-enable it, removing the "rem" is all that is required.

Re-boot and do another "MEM". If no good, re-enable and rem different lines. Re-boot and recheck.