From: fordke@infonode.ingr.com (Keith Ford)
Subject: MSCDEX.DOC
Organization: Intergraph Corporation, Huntsville, AL.
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 20:16:17 GMT


As requested...


MSCDEX.DOC

QUOTE...

...the files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT need to be modified to complete
the installation of MSCDEX.

To do this, connect to your bootable drive and edit the file
CONFIG.SYS. If the CONFIG.SYS file is not there, you will have to
create it. First, scan the contents of CONFIG.SYS to see if there
is a LASTDRIVE command line in it. This line will either have to
be modified or added to read:

     LASTDRIVE=Z

This lets MS-DOS know that it will have to allocate enough drive
records to account for the additional CD-ROM drive letters. It's
a good idea to have this line as the first entry in the
CONFIG.SYS file. The last drive in fact only needs to be the
largest drive letter that will be used on the system. For
example, a PC with 2 floppy drives (drives A and B), a hard disk
(drive C), and two CD-ROM drives (drives D and E) would only need
LASTDRIVE=E. A PC that is on a network though will typically
allocate more drive records than are used so that new network
drives can be added after booting.

Next, add entries for each device driver that is going to be
installed. The entry will read:

     DEVICE=<driver.sys> /D:<device_name> <driver specific
switches> 


The name of the device driver, driver.sys, will be replaced by
the full path name of the device driver that is being installed.
This will include the drive letter of the bootable drive followed
by the pathname of the device driver if the device driver was
installed in a subdirectory. If the above directions were
followed, then the device driver will be located in the root
directory. For example, on a hard disk system that boots off
drive C, a sample entry might read:

     DEVICE=C:\DRIVER.SYS /D:MSCD001

For the Hitachi driver, this should read:

     DEVICE=C:\HITACHI.SYS /N:1 /D:MSCD001

The next parameter /D:device_name is the name MSCDEX will use to
find the device driver. When the device driver is installed, this
name is what will be used by the device driver to name itself.
Every installed device driver must have a unique name. In
addition, due to the way that MS-DOS handles file opening, if
there is a device driver with the same name as a file in a
directory, then a file open call on that name will open a handle
to the device driver and not to the file. For this reason, you
will want to chose a device_name that will not likely be chosen
as a file name later. We recommend using names of "MSCDXXX" where
XXX is three digits. This will allow CD-ROM device driver entries
to be located in config.sys by the setup program at a later date.

The remaining fields for driver specific switches are device
driver dependent and will be specified in the documentation that
describes that particular device driver.

Next, AUTOEXEC.BAT needs to be edited to include an entry to
invoke MSCDEX each time the system is booted. If your PC is also
on a network, the network software must be installed before
MSCDEX. Otherwise the network will not install, since MSCDEX will
not allow the network to be installed second.

If your AUTOEXEC.BAT file starts up a 'shell' program such as
DOSSHELL or Windows, or runs another BAT file, you will need to
make sure the line that starts MSCDEX is ahead of the line that
starts your 'shell' or BAT file. Otherwise MSCDEX will not have a
chance to start the CD-ROM drives once your 'shell' or BAT file
begins.

A sample entry in AUTOEXEC.BAT to install MSCDEX would be:

C:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000 /D:MSCD001 /M:20 /V /E

Include the drive letter of the bootable disk and the full
pathname for MSCDEX. If the above directions were followed,
MSCDEX will be in the root directory. Each device driver will
have a device_name listed on the command line to MSCDEX following
'/D:'. MSCDEX will use this parameter to locate each of the
device drivers and this name must be the identical to each of the
device_name fields used for each device entry in CONFIG.SYS.

The /M:<value> switch determines how many sector buffers MSCDEX
will allocate when it installs itself. The larger this value is,
the more sector cache entries are available and the less MSCDEX
will have to read directly from the CD-ROM drive. It is
especially important that there be enough entries to cache the
path table, and the more entries available for directory sectors,
the less MSCDEX will have to reread the directory files.
Typically, each drive should have at a minimum about 4-5 buffers
per drive but the larger this value is, the better the
performance will be.

Both the CD-ROM device driver and MSCDEX both require small
amounts of additional memory to run which should not cause any
problems. But if you do find after you have installed MSCDEX that
some programs no longer run because there is not enough memory,
you may want to review your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to
locate other entries that consume memory such as GRAPHICS or
FASTOPEN that you may not require and can remove.

There is an additional parameter /E which will tell MSCDEX to use
expanded memory if it is installed and available. The verbose
switch /V will ask MSCDEX to print additional information about
memory usage during initialization.

For software that requires that the CD-ROM drive be on a
particular drive letter, you can use the /L:<drive letter>
switch. The SETUP program will not set this switch so you will
have to edit your autoexec.bat file if this switch is needed. For
example, the following will begin assigning CD-ROM drives at
drive letter L:

MSCDEX /D:MSCD001 /L:L

There are also two other switches: /K and /S. /K causes MSCDEX to
look for a Supplementary Volume Descriptor that identifies a
shift-JIS Kanji volume for Japanese and /S specifies that MSCDEX
patch DOS to allow CD-ROM drives to be shared on MS-NET based
servers.
MSCDEX - Microsoft MS-DOS CD-ROM Extensions Version 2.20


Installation Instructions - Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1989.
All rights reserved - page {page|1}

...ENDQUOTE

-- 
Keith E. Ford     __
Intergraph Corp  /  \ Micro Magic BBS 1:373/12  The Dragon Server
+1 205 730-8614  \__/ sysop@umagic.fidonet.org  server@ingr.com
fordke@ingr.com  [__] 830-2362 HST/V32bis 9600  "Subject: HELP"
Newsgroups: alt.cd-rom