Heres a toughy...

Well, since I frequent CodeGuru quite often I figured I would ask a question to some of our veterans of the Windows OS. I have an old Compaq Prolinea 4/50 on my desk with an NEC CD-ROM drive. I recently installed a sound card in it and its working great. Problem is... now the CD-ROM drive doesnt load anymore.

I have checked the CONFIG.SYS file and AUTOEXEC.BAT file and made sure that the driver was being loaded (NEC_IDE.SYS is the driver) and that the device name MSCD0001 is the same in both files. The problem I am getting is after HIMEM is loaded and completes checking my memory, it then loads the driver for the CD-ROM device and checks the device. This is where it fails. It sits for about 5 seconds or so and then I get a message saying "CD-ROM drive not ready <A>Abort or <R>Retry" and if I hit R, you'll hear the drive spin for about half a second and the message just repeats.

Now, if I remove the sound card the drive works just fine... I'm thinking the sound card is clashing with the driver for the CD-ROM but I'm not really sure. The CD-ROM is connected via IDE cable to another card, probably an interface card, because there isn't a connection available on the motherboard.

Maybe an IRQ is messed up somewhere, Im really not sure. The FCC ID on the CD-ROM card is IDE-16011. Anyone have any ideas?

EDIT:
Also, if I take the CD-ROM drive and place it on the same IDE cable as the hard drive and set it to Slave and the hard drive to Master, the CD-ROM driver loads and the sound card works as well. However, I get a message saying that the drive is incompatible with the 32-bit bus of the hard drive so Windows can only run in 16-bit mode. However, both work... So its probably something with the interface card. Possibly the driver, Im not sure.

I would also think that you may have IRQ conflicts. Most sound card allow changing IRQ for them usually through some jumper located on sound card board, so I would look at that.

Having said that, I'm glad that I do not have to deal with it anymore and I forgot how borked all that stuff was but your post remind it me.

I changed the IRQ setting on the sound card but... no avail. The sound card wasn't conflicting with the CD-ROM interface card anyway I dont think, I checked the IRQ settings on both. Something else is out of wack. This machine is just something I'm playing with for fun but its sort of frustrating trying to find documentation and help for it, lol. I just want to see if I can get the old goose running up to snuff again.

Thanks for any help :)