Problematic CD-ROM drivers

I haven't forgotten my blog. I've simply been too busy. Things are not going to get any better in the future. We (me, my wife and 6 month old baby) are moving to small 30m² apartment on November. The idea is to minimize expenses since we are planning to build our own house. But that takes time, usually more than planned, so we have to live long time in very small apartment. There is not enough room for my retro computers so I have to put them in storage for now. Best I can do is to keep my testing platform (basically a motherboard on a desk) so I can continue developing XTIDE Universal BIOS (I hope I have even a little bit time for that).

I mentioned a 486DX2/66 system previously. It is almost complete. It has been nice to learn FreeDOS with it although I had some problems with EMS managers. More about those once I've finished my testing.

Another problem have been a CD-ROM drive. I installed 32x Toshiba CD-ROM drive and it is jumpered as slave drive for primary IDE. Master drive is 6 GB Hitachi microdrive. I strongly recommend to connect CD-ROM drives to separate IDE channel when ever possible. This system only has primary IDE so it is not possible. I've usually used VIDE-CDD.SYS as generic CD-ROM driver. It has worked so far and it uses less memory than most other drivers. It did not detect this CD-ROM drive for some reason. All the other generic CD-ROM drivers I tried (including the UIDE that came with FreeDOS) did detect the drive but I constantly got read errors.

The Toshiba CD-ROM driver worked without read errors but it had completely different problem. It occasionally froze when loading it. When it didn't, everything worked fine. I managed to get few successful boots without freezing after I loaded the driver into low memory instead of high. The problem is not related to FreeDOS but affects MS-DOS as well. I'll need to do more testing to see if loading low is a working solution or was I simply lucky. I can't think of any reason why loading high would cause any problems unless

I'd like to know why this CD-ROM drive requires Toshiba drivers. It should be ATAPI drive and so it should work with generic ATAPI drivers but it did not.