I have a laptop that was runing windows 98se but one time when i started it up windows would not detect the cd drive. i have formated the HDD and i can boot from a windows 98 cd i made but it doesnot load the cd-rom driver because it says no cd drive is detected. The cd drive is obviously working because i am booting from the cd and i have checked bios settings.

I'm unclear of what the problem is. The normal method of installing Win98 is with a boot floppy. This floppy installs the CDrom drivers and creates a ram drive on the disk to facilitate the installation. With laptops that need to swap floppy and CDrom drives the proceedure is to copy some of the files that normally reside on the floppy to the harddrive but I can't give you more explicit instructions than that. As you have discovered you can't install Win98 the way you are attempting. Hopefully, someone else here will jump in and fill in the blanks. One thing I question though. What kind of Windows disk did you make? The term make and not copy implies that you may have tried to slipstream more onto the disk.

The CD i "made" is just a bootable CD i burned in nero using an image from the win98 boot disk. My problem is although my cd-rom drive is obviously working windows does not detect it.