I don’t know all that much about computers but over the years I’ve managed to pick up a few things. I’m now attempting to ‘do up’ an old 486 DX2. I’ve formatted the hard drive and made a boot disk with the drivers for the CD-ROM. When I start the PC it tells me that it has detected the CD-ROM. So far so good. Where my problem lies is I can’t switch to the CD-ROM to load Windows 95 from a CD. I’ve tried everything I can think of and anything anyone else has suggested but I just can’t switch to the CD-ROM. Where am I going wrong?

From your description of the problem I am assuming that you have put references to drivers for the CD-ROM in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT (as applicable) so that they load at startup. Even if you haven’t, continue reading. There are three scenarios as to why you can’t change to your CD-ROM drive. Firstly, you haven’t referenced to the CD-ROM drivers in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT which means that they won’t load at startup. The second scenario is that you have referenced to the drivers in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT but you haven’t placed a program named MSCDEX on your disk and loaded it. The final scenario is that you haven’t done both of the above. But never fear! There is a sure fire way to create a boot disk and we’ll have you up and running in no time. Before we go any further, I’ll explain MSCDEX. Microsoft’s CD-ROM Extension (MSCDEX) is a program which, in essence, assigns a drive letter to your CD-ROM drive. When the drivers recognise the CD-ROM drive they don’t assign a letter to it, that is MSCDEX’s job. This is the most likely reason that you can’t change to your CD-ROM drive. MSCDEX isn’t a GUI program but requires command line instructions such as the device name of your CD-ROM in order to run and assign a letter. Unfortunately, all computers are set up differently so there isn’t a set of universal commands which will work for MSCDEX. For this reason, I am referencing you to this URL: www.derglanderhaus.com/howto/bootdisk.htm . This tutorial explains how to create boot disks with CD-ROM drive support if you are using Windows 95 or Windows 98 to create the disk. This article is clearly written and should be easy to follow. However, I suggest that you don’t write over the current disk you have created but use another disk in case this method doesn’t work and you want to use the old one you created.
The tutorial at the above URL asks you to place MSCDEX on the disk. In the event that you don’t have this file you can download it from the following site: ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/MSCDX223.EXE . Once the file download has been completed, you will need to run the MSCDX223.EXE file to extract the MSCDX.EXE file from it (as it is a self-extracting archive). The MSCDEX.EXE file will be placed/extracted into the same directory as the MSCDX223.EXE file. In any case, if you run into any trouble or the method at the above URL doesn’t work, please contact me again and I will be more than happy to help.