DOS ain't dead

Greetings, everyone!

So I have a relatively modern PC for DOS (from 2013), and I only have USB optical drives for it, no driver worked for them that targets them as one. Recently I learned about ELTORITO.SYS, which works well (I burned a CD with isolinux on it that simply chain-boots my DOS hard drive, but having El Torito services active). It works for data discs (both CD and DVD), but for audio discs, only a not-ready-error is displayed.

So is eltorito.sys supposed not to handle audio discs or is it some issue I should fix or work around?

Thanks.

---
DOS isn't about why. It's about why not.

Hi KormaX!

The El Torito infrastructure lets you access the data contents of a bootable CD or DVD through the BIOS, similar to how you access LBA harddisks and SSD. This also means that you cannot use El Torito for playing audio, alas.

Note that you are also not supposed to CHANGE the disk after booting, so the driver normally only works for the boot medium itself. If it works in other situations for you, I would like to hear which and also which tricks you applied to get it to work in those contexts

Which of the possible USB drivers have you tried yet and what were your results or error messages?

Regards, Eric

---
FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

Hi!

Simple. When I tried it, I realized that the replacement disks are only read up to the size of the boot disk, then it read repetitively. Meaning that the directory tree is read correctly, but the file contents are gibberish. So I continued the boot disk by filling it up entirely, and now the original size registered by the motherboard upon booting covers the sizes of the replacement disks so they work. My next try will be a bootable mixed mode disk or a bootable CD extra to see what happens if the original media also contains CD-DA tracks.

---
DOS isn't about why. It's about why not.

Okay, that's interesting. I realized my motherboard installs eltorito services without booting the disk. Instead, if the firmware finds boot information on the disk in the drive when checking the disks during startup, it enables BIOS services to it. I boot my HDD regularly, but the optical drive is accessible through ELTORITO.SYS just because it contained a bootable disk when I have powered up the computer. With this method, the sizes are (or at least seem to be yet) irrelevant. I don't know whether it is a typical behaviour or not.

---
DOS isn't about why. It's about why not.