Heres a toughy...

[RaleTheBlade]

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.