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