What I am trying to do is relatively simple in theory, but has proved to be quite a beast. I formatted my friends hardrive, which contained win 95, then I tried to install 98se by using a boot disk to find the CDROM, this is not working. The CDROM is not working, it did work prior to the format. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

manually load the atapi drivers (generic CDROM drivers)

If it in an older, proprietary CD-ROM that connects to a soundcard or ISA card, you will have to find the driver and manually edit the config.sys file.

If you were using a Win95 startup floppy, switch to a win98 floppy. It has drivers for the common cdrom drives. If that doesn't work, see Post #2

Sscdrom.sys is a good driver for most cdroms.

Tsk, tsk...I know that this won't help you, but maybe it will help others..... ALWAYS test your bootdisk before you format the HD !!!!!!!!! If the bootdisk doesn't work, you can probably find the right CD driver on the harddrive already. Copy it to the bootdisk, then TEST IT AGAIN!!!!!!! Hope this helps someone else. Dave

When you boot from a startup floppy a ramdrive is created as drive D and the CD-ROM drive moves up one letter and becomes drive E.