CD drive could be bad. Or the power connector may be loose / faulty.

When you put a disc in - do you notice that it's struggling to read it for some time before giving up, or does it behave as if the tray is empty?

It behaves like the tray is empty. I have two cd drives in there any two floppy 5.25 and 3.5. I’ve taken them out and tried in every order I can think of. I’ve had only one in at a time and still nothing.

Xray1281 wrote on 2023-01-04, 18:52:

It behaves like the tray is empty. I have two cd drives in there any two floppy 5.25 and 3.5. I’ve taken them out and tried in every order I can think of.

And none of them work?

None. So I think I have something else wrong. I know the bios I have is messed up but I can’t update it because nothings reading. It registers they are plugged in but nothing reads.

You haven't specifically said if the drive is assigned a letter in DOS. For a CD-ROM drive, it's not enough that the BIOS enumerates it-- it needs a device driver (such as SBIDE.SYS or CDMKE.SYS or any number of others depending on drive) and a network redirector (the latter typically being MSCDEX.EXE).

What do your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT look like?

Sorry for the late response. Not sure what they are. Not the best at this stuff. I’ll try to find out. Thanks for letting me know about this.

so did you actually try to boot to DOS off a floppy? a good boot disk, like the ones that can be created in win98, will already have all the CD drivers in place so that you can launch setup off the CD drive. supposedly only the OEM CD of 98SE is bootable, which might be the issue here.

also just in case, make sure the master/slave jumpers on all of your drives are set correctly, and devices are placed correctly on the cable ("lone" end goes to the motherboard, other end master, middle connector slave).

My copy of windows 98 se was sealed when I got it. It only had a cd. But i put the bios update of a floppy to update the motherboard and that didn’t read either. I’m really sorry if I’m doing something stupid here. I don’t know the tech very well but I really want to learn.