Clean System Can't Get CDRom Drive Recognized

Is the operating system supposed to be on the boot disk?
How do I get the information from the boot disk to the hard drive?
What step or steps am I missing in the following steps.

Any assistance in saving my sanity would be appreciated.

Any detailed help would sincerely be appreciated. I hope that you can help even though it only involves DOS as far as getting the CD rom to work. The situation follows:

I am attempting to get a new system to recognize the cdrom drive.
The system is clean. It was booted with a Win98 bootable disk.

After receiving a C:\ prompt, I attempted to load the cdrom driver for the Magicspin 36X cdrom. It wanted mscdex, said not found. I tried again and put in the 98 boot disk and put a: as the source. Then when I attempted to load the cdrom driver, I received a message that said do I want to add lines to autoexec.bat and config.sys. I chose no because it referenced the a:\ drive. When I chose yes, as I suspected, it then wanted a disk in the a:\ drive before it would boot. HELP.

I receive an error message that mscdex could not be detected.

At the C:\ prompt I typed dir/w and the following information was revealed:

IO.Sys
MSDOS.Sys
Command.com
[cdromdrv]

3 files 316,277 bytes
1 dir 6,168,82 mb free

At the C:\ CDROMDRV the following information appears:
[.]
[..]
ATAPICD.sys
1 file 22,208 bytes

The driver for the MAGICSPIN is version 1.41.

I need very specific instructions on how to go further. I attempted to use the manual and the solutions offered there, but evidently there are steps that I should automatically know and don't.

Your assistance will be very much appreciated.

RSteib

Hi,

As I understand you have Win98 bootable disk and disk with CDROM driver. Try to boot from Win98 disk and use the command SYS C:. Then remove Win98 boot disk and reboot from you hard drive, and then use you CDROM diskette to install CDROM driver to your C: drive. Then reboot and you will have your CDROM accessible.

Good luck, Igor M.

If you are doing a fresh install of WIN98, forget the drivers for the CD. When you boot from teh WIN98 Diskette, it will ask if you wish to boot with CD-ROM support. Just say yes. When WIN98 is installing itself, it will load all the drivers you need on it's own.