Don't know if anyone can help? A friend of mine just bought a laptop that came with no O/S or CDROM drive. He bought an external (Freecom) CDROM drive and connected it and is using a win 98 boot disk with CD-ROM support. However when he boots up from the startup disk, the CD-ROM doesn't work. He gets "Device Driver not found: MSCD001" and "No valid CD-ROM device drives selected" He thenn used the driver floppy disk that came with the CDROM and installd those drivers as the generic bootdisk ones obviously weren't compatible. It told him to run A:\fcinst.exe and it appeared to successfully install them. It said installation has been completed successfully and told him to reboot to activate the changes to CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. It also said that diagnostic tools were loaded on Drive D. However no CDROM appears to be present still. It doesn't give the usual message about which drive letter it was assigned to. Looking at CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, they say: @REM MSCDEX.exe /D:FCCD001 CD-ROM DRIVER FOR DOS and AUTOEXEC.BAT is: @C:\MSCDEX.exe /D:FCCD001 MSCDEX.EXE is present on the root of C:\ but the same message comes up every time about device driver not found. The external CDROM drive is connected via a parallel cable. Thanks in advance for any help. Have I missed something really obvious?

Your friend have not completed making the boot disk for his external cd-rom. 'fcinst' should have made changes to the config.sys and autoexec.bat on the hard drive and installed the driver file(s). To make a boot disk you have to make the autoexec.bat and config.sys to reflect the changes on the hard disk, and copy the required files as needed. MSCDEX is not the device driver. It is the interface between the device driver and the file system. What is drive D where the diagnostics are loaded? It is NOT the CD drive. It is either the RAMDISK created by the windows boot disk or your hard drive is partitioned into several valumes.