I stumbled upon (quite by accident mind oyu) that some of the updates to
the cd file system in fix pack 17, corrected some problems I had with an
nec 4x4 cd changer.  In particualr, under os/2, only one drive letter would
be assigned to the cd drive, leaving the other 3 bays unused, as of fix
pack 17 this is corrected and 4 drive letters are associated with the cd
drive.

why I packaged this set of files instead of telling you to download fix
pack 17 :)

When I installed fix pack 17, it well did not work at all on my system, teh
machine would reboot and come to the desktop, and just hang there, leaving
me no options but to cold reboot, I noticed that on reboot, I had an extra
three drive letters somewhere, one program I use (super virtual disk)
creates a virtual floppy disk for use with programs, and it assigned the
drive letter of K: instead of the usual H: so I realized that the os2 cdrom
file system must have been updated to include multi disc changer (yahoo!) I
packaged these, cause 1) it's much smaller than fix pack 17 and 2) fix pack
17 killed my system and I had to reinstall os/2


Files included in this patch


12-04-95   9:34p     41795           0  CDFS.IFS
 5-19-95   5:16p      3949           0  CDROM.TBL
10-30-95   3:13p     30636           0  IBM1S506.ADD
10-30-95   3:14p     20358           0  IBMIDECD.FLT
10-30-95   3:05p     26580           0  OS2CDROM.DMD
12-04-95   9:24p     13264           0  UCDFS.DLL
                                        README.TXT (this file)

Conventions used for following instructions:

c: refers to your os/2 boot drive

How to install

Copy cdfs.ifs to c:\os2\boot

Copy cdrom.tbl to c:\os2\install (not needed but it updates selective
install to list 2 other cdroms I think :)

Copy ibm1s506.add and ibmidecd.flt c:\os2\boot these files may not be
needed, I don't use them on my system, but some systems may require them,
just in case :)

copy os2cdrom.dmd c:\os2\boot (this is the file that makes all the diff
withought it, it will not function in the correct manner)

Copy ucdfs.dll c:\os2\dll

Now reboot your machine, it may take longer to boot, because os/2 decides
it wants to check all of the drives in the system on bootup, changing the
cd's, and stuff takes some time, quickest way around this is to pop a cd
during bootup, or have no cd's in the cd drive, but it will boot, it just
takes a minute extra or so.

Repercussions: you now have 4 cd drive letters on your system under
multimedia (at least here) it gives you 2 cdaudio devices, so you can have
a cd in 2 possible drives, which 2 you select you have to choose in
multimedia setup note that you CANNOT play a cd from any of the 4 drive,
os/2 doesn't track that.

All in all it works well, when changing the drive letter from the command
line, you may have to do it twice, it doesn't change the cd fast enough for
os/2, so it will give an error message, but if you change the drive, get
error message change again, it will be ready for you.  From the WPS it
works fine, the WPS is apparently patient enough for the drive to change :)



If you have any questions about this, or anything pertaining to it, contact
me (Tony Ironside) at ironside@softnc.com
