Jeff

Thank you for your suggestions which have given the
following (mixed) results.

Cables ok. Removed CD Rom devices in safe mode and re-
booted in safe mode but Windows did not recognise the
device.

Tried booting with a startup disk from bootdisk.com. At
start-up it found the drive and re-assigned another drive
letter to it. However, the although the screen said
Windows 98 was starting, the process stopped at the A:\
prompt.

The good news is that by changing to the newly assigned
drive letter I could get DIR to read the CD in the drive
and hoped that meant the device was OK? I tried repeating
the process a few times. Mostly, but not always, I could
read the CD - but sometimes the system would hang for a
few seconds then I would get "not ready - abort, retry or
fail". Perhaps an transient mechanical failure?

The bad news is that I could not get windows to start at
all to test it properly. When I changed to the C:\ drive
and the windows directory all I got was a message "A
device or resource required by VFAT is not present or is
unavailable. VFAT cannot continue loading. System halted".
[Incidentally, my normal "start-up disk" which I have
never tried before now gives the same result]. Is this a
related problem or one for another newsgroup?

I do not have easy access to another PC or drive so I may
not be able to pursue your final suggestion for some time.
Meantime, is there anything you wish to add? Thanks.