ciaraldi@cs.rochester.edu (Mike Ciaraldi) (11/27/89)
Does anyone have experience with running a CD-ROM on a Xenix system? Or even know if it is possible? Here's the situation: The system I am working on has an IBM-PC compatible 386 running SCO Xenix/386 and DOS (not at the same time, of course!). It has a Sony CD-ROM (compact disk/read-only memory) drive and controller. The CD-ROM we want to access is "Books in Print" from Bowker. It comes with DOS software for interactive access to the data base on the CD-ROM. It also comes with drivers for assorted CD-ROM drives (including the Sony), which implement what are called "MS-DOS Extensions". With these, we can access the disk under DOS as a 600MB drive (which I think means the disk is in "High Sierra" format"). Everything works fine under DOS. The problem is that we have to shut down Xenix when we want to run this program. So, my question is: Is there a way to run this software under Xenix, perhaps using something like VPix? Some points: The CD-ROM drive vendor was unable to give us any info on drivers for Xenix. But then, they couldn't tell us about cables or anything else. If it wasn't in the catalog, they didn't know it existed, and if it was, they didn't know what it was. Sorry, Sony. It's possible we could dig deeper on this. I don't know if any other vendors have Xenix drivers for Sony or other CD-ROM drives. SCO said they didn't know if this could be made to work, but the standard DOS add-on driver would not be any help when running VPix. Since a driver deals with the hardware directly, a DOS-compatible driver can't be added to VPix; the driver would have to be linked to Xenix. Bowker, which makes the CD-ROM and the access software, has not be helpful either. So, I'm sending this out to the real experts--the net! Thanks in advance for any help at all, Mike Ciaraldi uucp: ...rutgers!rochester!ciaraldi arpa: ciaraldi@cs.rochester.edu
davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (11/28/89)
In article <1989Nov27.005250.20032@cs.rochester.edu> ciaraldi@cs.rochester.edu (Mike Ciaraldi) writes: | Does anyone have experience with running a CD-ROM on a Xenix system? | Or even know if it is possible? You can read High Sierra or ISO 9660 disks (I'm not sure they're different) as a read only filesystem. The first time you load the ROM you have to create a head with a "cdmkfs" command. Then you can mount and dismount (using cdXXXX commands). Micro Design International, Inc 6985 University Blvd Winter Park FL 32792 407/677-8365 My recollection is that the price was quite reasonable. Their controller can support up to seven heads, if you are considering a documentation server (which I was). -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon