Trying To Add A Dvd Drive To A Vintage Win98 Laptop

Hi, I've had a Compaq Armada 3500 a while and got it working with dual boot Dos / Windows 98 using some software off this site if I recall correctly. Haven't used it for a while and recently thought I'd tinker with it and get the broken CDROM drive working. The original drive is hard to come by, but I picked up a drive by the same maker, Matsushita, that's 3 years younger but has the same connector and is a DVD / CDRW drive.

Although Windows recognises the old CDROM drive that doesn't work, it doesn't recognise this drive at all. When I try to add new hardware, the "secondary IDE controller (dual FIFO)" has a yellow exclamation mark next to it and is said to require a driver update. When I point to the drivers from the Windows 98 CD that I have on the hard drive, it says best driver is already installed "MSHDC.INF". When I go to System Properties, it says the Secondary IDE Controller's status is "This device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed".

So I booted into the DOS partition and included the lines in Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for an IDE CDROM drive, and the drive is recognised and works.

Does anybody know where I'm going wrong?

 

Are you just using MS drivers? Look at Windows IDE drivers or CD-ROM drivers from the manufacture of the devices.

 

I looked for drivers. Couldn't find Windows 98 drivers for UJDA730, the drive in question, but I found some for UJDA720 and they didn't work. Tried a panasonic DVD driver and that didn't work either

 

I've heard if you just do a simple (and free) upgrade to Windows98 SE that should solve your problem.

 

Tried all sorts of drivers and none worked. It was Windows 98 Second Edition already. But weirdly tried it again today to try something else and found the drive was recognised on power up. Thought it might have been a previous driver I tried but when I looked in the Device Manager it says no driver files are required or have been loaded for this device. Go figure? I wonder if it will stop working again