I apologize for the consumption of bandwidth.  I have queried the
distributor from whom I purchased Debian for support, but this particular
problem appears to be quite specific and I'm hoping someone on the list may
have already encountered it.

Here are two lines from the CD-ROM howto:

"If you recently bought a CD-ROM drive, don't assume that if it connects to
a SoundBlaster card it should use this [sbpcd] kernel driver.  Most CD-ROM
drives being sold by Creative Labs are now EIDE/ATAPI drives."

"Some documentation may refer to proprietary interfaces as IDE, leading some
to mistakenly believe they are ATAPI drives."

So, the CD-ROM howto didn't clarify which I should be using for my
particular case.  It's a SB16 PnP, with a 4x CD-ROM that plugs into the
soundcard.  The manual refers to the drive as IDE.

I have installed the base linux kernel installed (from my DOS partition),
and can boot up without a hitch.  I tried installing the sbpcd driver from
the bootstrap menu until my face turned blue, to no avail.  I also tried
installing from CD with every IDE option, opening and closing the drive door
regularly for good measure.

Here's a scenario.  I boot up DOS, along with the PnP drivers, so my
soundcard and CD-ROM work fine.  Then I soft boot using my Linux boot disk.
During boot up, I observe these messages:
hdh: Matshita CR-581 ATAPI CD-ROM drive
ide3 at 0x168-0x16f, 0x36e on irq 10
These messages do *not* appear if I hard boot straight into Linux.

Once I sign on, I type the following commands and get the following output:
(the * indicates items appearing only when I soft boot into linux from DOS,
having already loaded my DOS drivers)

cat /proc/devices
Character devices
        1       mem
        2       pty
        3       ttyp
        4       ttyp
        5       console
        7       vcs
        10      misc
        12      tpqic02
        36      netlink
Block devices
        1       ramdisk
        2       fd
        3       ide0
        7       loop
        9       md
        34      ide3 *
        36      ed

cat /proc/filesystems
                ext2
                minix
                msdos
        nodev   proc
                iso9660

cat /proc/interrupts
        0       timer
        1       keyboard
        2       cascade
        8       + rtc
        10      + ide3 *
        13      math error
        14      + ide0

cat /proc/ioports
0000-001f       dma1
0020-003f       pic1
0040-005f       timer
0060-006f       keyboard
0070-007f       rtc
0080-008f       dma page reg
00a0-00bf       pic2
00c0-00df       dma2
00f0-00ff       npa
0168-016f       ide3 *
01f0-01f7       ide0
036e-036e       ide3 *
03c0-03df       vga+
03f0-03f5       floppy
03f6-03f6       ide0
03f7-03f7       floppy DIR

>From a DOS application I use called ICU (interrupt configuration utility), I
can see my SB16 PnP is set up to use IRQ 5 and 10, DMA 1 and 5, I/O ports
108, 168-16f, 200-207, 220-22f, 330-331, 36e-36f, and 388-38b.  I have tried
all these IO ports and more with sbpcd, both after a soft boot from DOS and
a hard boot straight into Linux.

Finally, the command ln -s /dev/hdh /dev/cdrom does not work.  There is no
/dev/hdh, although linux finds hdh:Matshita CR-581 ATAPI CD-ROM drive during
start-up.

I have tried everything short of opening the case and playing with the
jumpers on the CD-ROM drive.  That will be a last resort only - my hands are
too big to perform such tasks safely.

Jeff J

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