hello, I have an old dell 7500 laptop and I recently formatted my hard drive. I set the BIOS settings back to factory default boot order,(floppy, hard drive, cd) I am using a win98 boot disk and a win98 se cdrom to try to install win98se. the problem is that my cdrom is shown as being there, and connected. But when i go and type in the cd drives name and ANY file (E:\setup) it says it cannot read from drive or drive is not ready. also even if i put : ( e:\>chkdsk ) it says: ( CDR101: Not ready reading drive E Abort, Retry, Fail? ) i am sure my cdrom drive is E and this same thing has happend in the past, but last time i just got lucky and it decided to work one day. this really ticked me off, since out of 50 tries it only read the disk once, and i was able to install win98se and upgrade to xp. But now i just can't seem to get it to work, I think its a problem with the hardware connection between the cdrom/floppy and its dock, but im probably wrong and dont really want to go in the laptop. ANY IDEAS OR SUGGESTIONS WOULD BE GREAT APPRECIATED. THANKS