I recently bought a Royal Laptop recently which had a disk drive but no CD-ROM drive. I bought a CD-ROM with PCMCIA for my laptop separately last week, and was running it fine in Windows. But, Windows 98 has been giving me tons of problems, and so I decided to reformat my harddrive and reinstall the OS. Now the problems begin:

I have tried a hundred different ways to install my CD-ROM drivers in DOS. I made a boot disk with for my CD-ROM drivers in Windows 98 on my friend's computer using my Windows 98 CD. That seemed to work fine. I also got an originial Windows 98 boot disk with my laptop. I have followed instructions for reinstalling the CD-ROM drive in DOS from both my laptop manual and CD-ROM manual. None are working. When I put the boot disk that I created with my CD-ROM drivers, the laptop does what the manual says it will: It loads the CD-ROM drivers and creates a drive Q:\, and my CD-ROM activates through the PCMCIA slot. But, when I put my Win98 CD in my CD-ROM, I can't access it because it says that something about no drive in Q:\ and it can't read it.

I also ran the CD-R0M drivers installation disk that came with my CD-ROM. When I run the install program, it only copies a folder called ARCDRIVE with four files, including MSCDEX, which I know is the main file in reinstalling the CD-ROM. But, it doesn't create any new drives and I still cannot access my CD-ROM drive, which I need to reinstall Windows 98.

I am very thankful if you are still reading this, and would deeply appreciate any help. I have read some of the other posts on this issue and they don't seem to be helping much.

Thanks!!

CD-Roms can be a real annoyance to set up because the driver commands are so cryptic. Anyway, here's a brief description of what's involved.

In the config.sys file, you need a driver command line like this one from my computer:

Device=C:\cdrom\oakcdrom.sys /d:gem001

This line loads a device using a sys file in the c:\cdrom directory named oakcdrom.sys
The /d:gem001 is actually 2 different things. First the /d: tells the CD-Rom driver to load the name gem001. You see, one device driver can actually control more than 1 CD-Rom so each CD-Rom has to have a name so the driver can identify it. Here, my CD-Rom has been named gem001.

The second part is a command line in the c:\autoexec.bat file that looks like this:

c:\windows\command\mscdex /d:gem001

This loads a program named mscdex.exe which is in the c:windows\command directory. This program is told to control the CD-Rom that has a driver that calls it gem001.

In my computer, these are the two steps that setup CD-Rom use in DOS.

I hope this helps you a little.