9fans archive / 1995 / 09 / 85 /    prev next

From: Doug Becker doug.becker@Eng...
Subject: more CD woes
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 14:11:04 -0400

    It turns out that the PC I've been using doesn't have either a SCSI
    CD-ROM or a SoundBlaster. Instead, the CD-ROM is given as an NEC
    CD on drive 2, presumably on a secondary IDE controller (you can
    tell I know nothing about PC hardware). Plan 9 isn't making this
    available as one of the /dev/hd* drives, so I presume there's no
    way this is going to work, is there?

Sorry, no answer here -- I've got a similar setup (a Sanyo 3-disk CD
changer apparently attached to the secondary IDE controller on the
motherboard), and just came to that realization myself.  (I haven't
really played much yet to see if I can get the CD mounted, however.)
I've got an Ensoniq Soundscape card, which I believe claims to be
SoundBlaster-compatible, but I've no idea if it's feasible to somehow
hang the changer off that; I assume not, though I intend to check it
out.

Exacerbating this is the presence of a perfectly functional Adaptec
2940 PCI SCSI card (connected to a cavernous and fast disk) which is
similarly unsupported, but that's yet a different story.  :-)  (jmk:  I
know you tried.  You wouldn't happen to have, say, a beta-quality 2940
driver, would you? :-)

If CDROMs must indeed be attached to either a SoundBlaster card or a
supported SCSI card (i.e., IDE is not supported), then it's a *major*
bummer.

                                Doug Becker
                                doug.becker@eng...

P.S.  My machine is a Gateway 2000 P5-120XL.  I've loaded the 4-floppy
system, and with a couple of exceptions (both of them minor, I think),
the system works splendidly.  Now if I can just get that CD
extracted...  :-)