OS/2 Warp and NEC CDR-271 CDROM

Last update: 6th November, 1995

I recently had a lot of trouble getting an NEC CDR-271 CDROM to work under Warp. This is an IDE CDROM and the only IDE device on the machine (the hard disk is SCSI). It worked fine under DOS.

I installed the latest ATAPI drivers, as per the instructions for NEC drives, and the symptom was that the machine would pause on bootup trying to reset the CDROM drive, with the BUSY light flashing. After about a minute it reported an error, before continuing to boot.

The cure was to move the CDROM drive from the primary to the secondary IDE adapter. It must also be installed as the master drive since there is no other SCSI device in the machine. DOS didn't care which IDE port it was on, but for some reason OS/2 did, so moving it cured the problem.

John Krivitsky