Jim McLean (and Jon) -

You can do what you indicate if you have a clean OS installation, with default drivers already present. The WinME system in question was "cleaned" of a bunch of existing viral crud, and the user thinks something too much may have been deleted. Since the CD drive doesn't respond, that's probably a good assumption.

It appears that the system tells him it can't find a .dll, and the assumption was made that the missing .dll was what prevents the CD drive from working. My guess is that the "missing" .dll is a leftover from a past - and disabled but not completely removed - virus. (see at Date: 24 May 05 - 03:24 PM) It's probably something else missing that prevents the CD drive from coming up, but if the system doesn't know the drive is there, it won't ask for the missing piece.

You can install a new CD drive "without any drivers" if certain default drivers are already there, and they will be there on almost any machine that's running normally. In addition, any current or recent device should be PnP, and the system can make any necessary driver installations - often without you noticing that it's being done.

The default driver (interface) for most CDs is mscdex.exe, and if it's present most CD drives are at least recognized. The basic mscdex.exe driver is a real-mode driver though, and WinME does not support any real mode operations (where programs can access hardware directly, without going through the OS).

WinME (and Win98SE) apparently used a default virtual driver, oakcdrom.sys, with switch settings possibly depending somewhat on the specific OS. Many CD drives look for mscdex.exe, so the usual Win98SE installation required a Config.sys and Autoexec.bat to call mscdex.exe and oakcdrom.sys to get them into RAM at boot time and sometimes to provide proper "aliasing" so the right one gets used.

The link at 29 May 05 - 03:20 PM details some of the problems with getting a good CD setup for a Win98SE boot, with CD-ROM support, when there is no OS on the drive; so this should be a "minimalist" CD-capable setup. The instructions are for how to prepare a machine for WinME installation though, and is unclear about whether the actual WinME installation adds some other pretty stuff for the CD drive.

A few newer CD drives use a modified driver that can get along without it, but for older and "basic" CD drives, mscdex.exe must be present in C:\, and typically is called with a /d:mscd001 switch. It will always be there for any default Windows installation - except possibly for WinME.

To get virtual access to the CD drive in Win98SE, the file oakcdrom.sys must be present on C:\. It, or an appropriate .vxd and/or .dll will always be present in any default Windows installation, if it's needed.

To "turn on" the required CD-ROM access, for Win98 at least, there must be an Autoexec.bat file on C:\ containing the line: "mscdex.exe /d:mscd001" and there must be a Config.sys file on C:\ containing the line: "device=oakcdrom.sys /d:mscd001".

Because WinME prohibits all real mode operations, at least in original WinME versions you can't make a boot floppy from the WinME installation disk. You need to get a Win98SE boot floppy, and use it to boot (real mode) and get the installation of WinME started in the laptop situation described at the link. The mscdex.exe may let the machine read the CD drive (real mode) to start the installation, or may use the oakcdrom.sys to access via the virtual layer. The oakcdrom.sys apparently is necessary to let the machine switch to virtual mode to continue without real mode access when WinME takes over.

The "minimum conditions" above are for Win98SE, since that's how you boot for the WinME installation for the condition cited at the link. WinME installation may make changes, so it's not clear that it's a "minimum condition" for a WinME sytem that's already installed. The WinME installation may add .dll and/or .vxd files to supplement or replace the "basic CD drivers," and may or may not remove or edit "redundant" Autoexec.bat and/or Config.sys files. Perhaps someone with a working WinME system could comment on whether the files listed above are there(?).

An additional complication is that the Specification for how CDs are formatted has been changed several times since WinME (or Win98 and Win2K in most cases) came out. There has been at least one change of some significance since WinXP was fairly new.

Once Spec change about 2-3 years ago significantly expanded the "writable area," so that wider travel of the "head" in the CD drive is required. At least one maker warns that using a "new disk" in CD burners with the old driver(s) can cause hardware damage to the drive. In readers, it's more likely you'd just get an "incompatible disk" error, although damage can't be ruled out. These "spec changes" are the reason for the frequent mentions in this thread that you should get a current driver if you need to install a driver.

Note that the "new" drive you just bought may have been assembled a couple of years ago, and the default drivers you have from any OS installation probably arent' really current.

Most CD drive makers will have websites with useful utilities. If you cannot identify your own CD device as to maker and model number (both usually needed), Pioneer has an "ID utility" that will often get what you need even for non-Pioneer drives. The file needed is usually called something like CHKRW.EXE, but it's somewhat OS specific, and it also seems to move around on their site, so you'll need to dig around to find the version you need. If you have difficulty finding them, you can start at Pioneer. This utility should identify maker, model number, and firmware version for any Pioneer drive or for any PnP drive by most other makers. (It may also tell you some interesting stuff about your hard drives etc.)

Of course, it would be better to start with the people who made your drive, and SysInfo and/or Device Manager should give you enough ID to do that, unless you have something pretty unusual.

John