windows95 not seeing cd-rom drive

Check a few details. Is the IDE Cables correctly connected? Is it master, slave or cable select? Is the drive acutally an IDE Drive? I have seen a few non IDE drives out there.

Also check the BIOS. It might not be detecting the CD Drive. The CDFS system is inbeded into windows. (there is no windows' drivers for CD Roms).

The next step is to make a startup/boot disk and configure the drive for DOS mode. This will confirm it is working. If it is not, there is one of the above issues still to be resolved. *(You can use the dos driver before windows loads. -Used to use this trick for an old 2x CD Drive).

After trying all the above...if it still doesn't work, check the device manager to make sure that both IDE channels are enabled.

If you check all the cables and BIOS and it sees the CD-ROM from a boot disk, but doesn't see it in Windows. Run regedit and do a search for "NOIDE" I think it is all one word, and if you find the key, delete it.

Try the following driver in the config.sys file:
http://www.driverguide.com/uploads/21.html
This is a link to VIDE-CDD.sys
The command line (in c:\config.sys) is:
device=vide-cdd.sys /D:mscd001

The site will ask you for the following:
username: driver or drivers, I forget
password: all
I have used vide-cdd.sys onhundreds of errant machines, and it seems to work almost every time. This should work. If not, I also use the following driver:
http://www.driverguide.com/uploads/uploads1/1095.html. This latter site also includes setup instructions for MSCDEX.EXE, should you need cd-rom access from MSDOS (ie from a strt-up disk).

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