CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

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Xanarki
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CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by Xanarki »

Randomly, out of nowhere, the CD-ROM drive in my setup buggered out.

I can still see the drive connected, and I can still load any actual disks or image files, but something got changed and I don't know what. The AutoPlay feature never works, games no longer recognize if anything is loaded, and the given CD or image icon in My Computer no longer appears next to a disc's name.

I've done the following so far, and nothing has changed:
  • Made sure that the CD-ROM drive's letter is the lowest (D).
  • Checked that no other drives, except for CD-ROM (D) and the hard drive (C), are connected.
  • Tried enabling and disabling the floppy drives as well.
  • Under the CD-ROM drive's properties in Device Manager, I made sure that the "Auto Insert Notification" box is checked.
  • Tried changing the drive speed in PCem's configuration screen.
  • In PCem's configuration screen, I've been using "PCemCD", but I've also tried switching to "AZT CDA" though it has the same problems.
  • I have tried .iso files, .cue files, .bin files, and actual physical disks, but they all have the same issues (via CD-ROM --> Image..).
  • I have also tried the above, but instead on my host PC's drives, yet same problems (via CD-ROM --> Host D & CD-ROM --> Host E, D is my physical drive and E is my virtual drive on the host PC).
  • Probably doesn't matter, but I've tried switching the processor slightly in my setup too.
  • If a game had a config file, I made sure that the CD-ROM drive's letter was "D" in the file.
My setup is Windows 98se, Intel Pentium MMX 200, Voodoo2, S3 Virge, SB AWE32, DirectX 7.0. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. Seems like my last resort is wiping it out and starting fresh.
tr.StEalTH
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by tr.StEalTH »

I like to keep a few backups of my setups around. For failed updates and what nots! It's saved me a few times. Anyways I set in pcem config cd to driver 2 SM E: Then it shows up as F: in windows with full hd list. Sometimes autorun works sometimes it don't idk Now if you install some games and driver letter gets changed. You will have to uninstall/ reinstall the game to find the drive again. Or use regedit to change the key to new drive letter Some games use a cd.cfg file also other types of files to find the cd driver You would have to edit those too. I'm sure you already know But that's all I could think of off hand buddy.
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leilei
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by leilei »

Sometimes blowing away all the devices in device manager and then letting it detect for all the stuff on a different board works.

There's also some rare cases of a boot virus affecting detection. There's at least one Win95 CD bootdisk out there that has a virus that sabotages MBRs and/or forces Windows 95 to enter a MS-DOS compatibility mode for the IDE controller (meaning no windows CD drivers). Keep a fresh read-only boot disk with FPROT handy. If you're not sure about this, try making a config on the FIC VA-503+ board and watch the BIOS-resident TrendMicro boot virus scanner go to work as you install Windows 95.
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

Windows 95 sometimes gets stuck in MS-DOS Compatibility mode even after all the problems are fixed, to get rid of it open the registry editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to this key:

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS
An then in the right pane right click on the "NoIDE" entry and delete it. Deleting it will not cause any problem, Windows will create that entry again if MS-DOS compatibility is required for any IDE drive.
The entry value can also be changed to 00 but editing binary data entries is somewhat tricky and you can end with a completely wrong value... As you can see in the last two screenshots the result is exactly the same, after restarting Windows the yellow exclamation marks of the IDE controller have disappeared from the device manager.

Before with IDE drives in MS-DOS compatibility mode:
W95NoIDE01.png
W95NoIDE01.png (33.61 KiB) Viewed 4905 times
After changing the value from "01" to "00":
W95NoIDE00.png
W95NoIDE00.png (31.95 KiB) Viewed 4905 times
After deleting the "NoIDE" entry:
Attachments
W95NoIDE.png
W95NoIDE.png (30.25 KiB) Viewed 4905 times
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

:idea: To remove all devices from device manager at once and without having to reboot a bunch of times use the registry editor to go to:

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
And delete the "enum" subkey, then if you reopen the device manager it will be empty, and after rebooting the machine (using the start menu->Shut Down->Restart the computer) Windows will start finding new hardware and installing the corresponding drivers, otherwise run the "Add new hardware" control panel applet and let it search for new hardware.
Windows may need to reboot the machine several times before all drivers are reinstalled, then to make sure it has found all devices, including non-Plug & Play ones, run the "Add new hardware" control panel applet and let it search for new hardware, if you have run it in the previous step do it again.

Device manager before deleting the "Enum" subkey:
W95ENUM.png
W95ENUM.png (24.84 KiB) Viewed 4903 times
Device manager after deleting the "Enum" subkey:
W95NOENUM.png
W95NOENUM.png (19.95 KiB) Viewed 4903 times
After restarting Windows, it found new hardware:
W95DETECT.png
W95DETECT.png (6.24 KiB) Viewed 4903 times
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

Xanarki wrote: Wed 09 Feb, 2022 2:58 am [*]Under the CD-ROM drive's properties in Device Manager, I made sure that the "Auto Insert Notification" box is checked.
Ooops, in my previous posts I completely forgot about autorun, there is another possible cause for it to fail even if "Auto Insert Notification" is enabled, open the registry editor and navigate to:

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HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
The key NoDriveTypeAutoRun should have a value of 95 00 00 00
That key is only for the current user, there may be another optional key with the same name that overrides this one and affects all users located at:

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
If present the key NoDriveTypeAutoRun should have also a value of 95 00 00 00

It seems it needs to be set exactly to 95 00 00 00 but a program (virus?) can set it to 95 and that won't work. Or it could have been set to any other value or even deleted.

To fix it you can open notepad (inside the emulated machine) and write this code:

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REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=hex:95,00,00,00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=hex:95,00,00,00
Then save the file with any name and a reg extension, like "autorun.reg" (include the quotes so notepad saves the file using that extension instead of saving it as autorun.reg.txt)
Then double-click on that registry file, that should write the correct data, restart Windows and see if autorun works again.

:idea: Or use the easy fix for a lot of problems: download the latest version of the TweakUI utility from the Microsoft website (well, actually an archived version of the Microsoft website) and then read this guide to find how to install it, once installed open it from the control panel and select the "Paranoia" tab, there check "Play data CDs automatically" and click "Apply"
As the guide says TweakUI can be found on some Windows 98 CDs too, also some version is available for download on that same website, but I don't know if that is the latest version...

Registry key:
W95NDTA.png
W95NDTA.png (25.38 KiB) Viewed 4901 times
eddman
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by eddman »

ruben_balea wrote: Sat 12 Feb, 2022 1:34 am also some version is available for download on that same website, but I don't know if that is the latest version...
Just a side-note; you can find out the version of the file in windows 98.

Extract the "tweakui.exe" install file. Right-click on the "tweakui.cpl" file, go to Properties, and then the Version tab.

So far I've only seen versions 1.25 and 1.33 around the internet.
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

But it was no longer available on the Second Edition CD-ROM...
eddman
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by eddman »

I'm talking about the downloaded exe install file. I wrote 98 because the file version cannot be seen in, for example, windows 10.
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

Sorry, here it was very late (I'm from Spain) and since I was half asleep I understood it as "you can find THAT version of the file in Windows 98" :oops:

Yes, I'm aware that Windows 10 developers have forgotten (or they are too young to even know) that CPL and SCR files were also executables :roll: but it will read the version information if you change the file extension to DLL or EXE

:idea: Most times I use WinRAR to literally read the version of a program that comes in a compressed archive, you can right click on the file and select "View" or just press Alt+V, then Control+F to search for "FileVersion"
WinRAR shows the file contents as plain text only but it can be switched between Dos Text, Windows Text , Unicode UTF-8 and Unicode UTF-16LE using the "View" menu or by left clicking on the right section of the status bar where it shows the current text mode to switch to the next mode.
So if nothing is found on the first try switch between "Windows Text" and "Unicode UTF16" and search again from the beggining. I'm not sure if UTF-8 is also used in StringFileInfo structures, I guess it can be used if one wants to include special characters there...
Xanarki
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by Xanarki »

Thank you for all the responses. ruben, I appreciate taking the time to screenshot as well. That regedit tip about removing devices will deff come in handy!

As it turns out, the problem was, unsurprisingly, my fault. Lol. Awhile back, I had forgotten that I edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I added in lines so that a CD-ROM drive could be recognized by DOS games, since I was having problems with CDs and ISOs not being detected when restarting in MS-DOS mode. The line of code I used was:

(autoexec.bat)
SET PATH=C:\Windows;C:\
rem - By Windows Setup - LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CDROM
LH C:\ctmouse.exe
(system.sys)
DEVICEHIGH=C:\oakcdrom.sys /D:CDROM
Apparently, having the CD-ROM lines is the reason why the CD-ROM drive was wonky in Windows 98. After I deleted them, everything was back to normal. I don't know why it caused the issues. Maybe I grabbed the wrong CD-ROM DOS driver? I'm not certain, but, at least I figured out the culprit.
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ruben_balea
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by ruben_balea »

If you had that exact line in AUTOEXEC.BAT

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rem - By Windows Setup - LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CDROM
then the Windows setup has moved

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LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CDROM
to a file called C:\WINDOWS\DOSSTART.BAT which is executed when you exit to DOS from the Windows 95/98 Start menu and MSCDEX.EXE is not loaded when Windows starts.
If that was the case then the compatibility issue was probably caused by the OAKCDROM.SYS driver itself, if you still need CD-ROM support for DOS games you can try the VIDE-CDD.SYS driver (https://sites.google.com/site/pcdosretro/vide-cdd) patched for PCI IDE controllers and see if that works.

:arrow: Alternatively and perhaps even easier you can download the Creative CD-ROM drivers, these are used for both IDE controllers on the motherboard and expansion or sound cards (see bellow) and when exiting from Windows to MS-DOS mode will automatically load the CD-ROM drivers:
https://files.creative.com/manualdn/Dri ... IDED95.EXE

You have to put that file in a 1.44 mb floppy image or directly on the disk image used in PCem, you can use WinImage (https://www.winimage.com/download.htm) for that, be sure to choose on the save dialog to save it as "Image file (*.ima)" because the default option of "compressed image file" (*.imz) will save the image compressed in ZIP format and that is not (yet) recognized by PCem.

Then you can run it inside Windows 95/98, it will extract its contents to the same folder so better place it in a new folder like c:\sb to remember where the files are, after extracting it you will find a setup.exe in that folder which is the Creative CD-ROM driver setup for Windows, run it and follow the setup wizard, on the last screen choose the first option, if you have PCem configured with CD-ROM as "Drive 1 Primary Slave (D:)" it should work fine.
*Even if you are emulating any model of Sound Blaster sound card in PCem the CD-ROM drive will be on the emulated motherboard IDE controller.
To test it exit Windows from the start menu and choose restart in DOS mode, the drivers will load, show you the drive letter assigned to the CD-ROM and if everything is OK you should be able to access the contents of the CD-ROM.
*To return to Windows after using those drivers in DOS mode you have to press Control+Alt+Del to restart the computer, if you type "exit" or "win" Windows will probably fail to load properly.


:idea: SBIDED95.EXE is just a self extracting ZIP file for DOS, but some web browsers may block the download considering it a dangerous file, if that happens to you normally in the same warning window there is some kind of advanced option to continue the download, otherwise you can try using another browser. Maybe some antivirus might want to block it too, coming directly from the Creative official website it shouldn't really have any viruses and MS-DOS executables won't work on Windows 10 anyway.
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Arjen42
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Re: CD-ROM drive only partially works - unsure if Win98 or PCem bug

Post by Arjen42 »

I would recommend setting up different emulated PC's. One for Windows 98 games and one for DOS games. This way you could set the Windows 98 one up without DOS cd-rom and mouse drivers, and let the other one just boot DOS with cd-rom and mouse drivers.

Maybe an extra one for the really old DOS games that only run correctly on the very first PC's, if you're into those games.
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