Many fall into a form of denial that a hardware issue is present. I can't offer much help for those.
I will however note a TACTICAL ERROR in trying to use DOS CDROM drivers in Windows versions past 3.1. Windows 95 and 98 will allow use of DOS drivers, but you will find such to fail in many odd ways. The real fix for 95/98 is to remove any reference to CDROM units in the CONFIG.SYS AUTOEXEC.BAT files and have the OS support the drives natively.
Usually, all I need to do is to install the motherboard IDE drivers, set the IDE controller in the Device Manager to "Both" and reboot. If the drives are functional and configured correctly, then they just work.
If the hardware has defects, your problems will continue.
Bob
I have tried a couple of timeS to post my problem onto these forum boards but I am still having severe problems.
The problem that I have is concerning my CD drives. I have a Packard Bell computer and the first drive came with the computer and is a Goldstar CD-Rom-CRD-8240B and the second I installed a couple of years ago and is a Toshiba DVD-Rom SD-R1002. The problem is that neither of these drives seem to be reading any of the files on the CD's that I place into them. All that occurs when I click onto 'my computer' is that it shows that there are no documents when there clearly are.
What I have done so far is firstly to clean the drives with a multimedia laser lens cleaner. Then I installed new drivers generic atapi divers from them by using drivers-guide.com. This caused me more problems as the letter drives that it installed to were not the same as
the CD letter drives and therefore it caused a conflict so I delted these generic drivers.
I even deleted the drives from from the settings device manager in the hope that the computer would recognise them on re-booting and ask whether I wanted to install them but this wasn't the case and for some reason but they were still there on rebooting. When I looked in the settings device manager again it showed them as still being there.
Presently I have only the two letter drives of 'f' and 'g' on the computer.
Someone has suggested that I check the settings in safe mode, the problem is that I cannot access this mode for some reason. I have tried a number of times to hold down and press F8 and have also tried the CTRL key but to no avail.
On another note when I go into DOS the screen message always states :
>LH C:\windows\command\mscdex.exe /d:mscd0000/l:f
Device Drivers Not Found:'MSCD000'
No Valid CDROM device drivers selected
Can anyone help me please?
Any real and useful help would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.

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