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Date:      Mon, 12 Nov 2001 07:08:58 +0000
From:      Josh Paetzel <friar_josh@webwarrior.net>
To:        "James Stapley (Discus)" <fishwatch@ru.ac.za>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Old "Panasonic" CD-ROM not detected on install FreeBSD 4.4 - Help please! =)
Message-ID:  <20011112070858.F723@twincat.vladsempire.net>
In-Reply-To: <3BEF81A1.BB991CE1@ru.ac.za>; from fishwatch@ru.ac.za on Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 10:00:33AM %2B0200
References:  <3BEF81A1.BB991CE1@ru.ac.za>

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On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 10:00:33AM +0200, James Stapley (Discus) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to install FreeBSD 4.4 on an old machine I found in the
> basement to act as a very basic webserver and for me to play around with
> a unix like environment. (It's a Cyrix 486 clone with 32 megs of ram and
> 500 odd megs HDD).
> 
> The problem comes when I try to install FreeBSD; the floppies work fine
> and do their thing up to a point, however, it is not detecting the
> CD-ROM drive which is connected to a soundblaster 16 in the machine (I
> checked it was working before fdisking the HDD to remove the DOS
> partitions and it was). How can I force it to recognise the drive?
> Getting it to install from a CD is somewhat tricky with no working CD
> rom drive... It's definitely one of those panasonic type cd's and not an
> IDE one. I think this machine is so archaic the bios probably doesn't
> support EIDE devices (such as CD ROM's). Also, the IDE cable has only
> one connector and there is only one IDE channel on the card.
> 
> I couldn't find anything on this topic after numerous searches online.
> 
> Many thanks for your help,
> 
> James.


This is almost certainly a Matsushita CR-563b 2x proprietary drive.  I 
have had extensive experience with these things.  The FreeBSD driver 
matcd does work with these drives, but it usually will not initialize 
the controller on a soundblaster correctly.  You either need just the 
stand alone controller for the drive which is rare and hard to come 
by, or I have had some luck by booting the machine into dos and 
letting the dos drivers initialize the board, and then do a soft 
reboot.  

I believe someone else mentioned installing the drive on a different 
machine and then installing FreeBSD on it, and then transfering it 
back to the original machine.  This will work fine, too, as FreeBSD 
does not create a suicide pact with the hardware ala windows.


Josh


> 
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> 
> 
> 
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