I had a Windows 95 horror story on a friend's 486. We installed Windows 95 via the CD-ROM (which was one of the old models with it's own ISA controller card). Windows installed perfectly, but as soon as Windows booted up on it's own, the CD-ROM was gone. Absolutely no where to be found. After doing a lot of research on a relatively new operating system (Windows 95 was still brand new at the time), I learned that I still had to manually load the DOS drivers for the CD-ROM and it's controller card via the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files.

Another one occured actually not that long ago. I was trying to install Windows 98 to an old computer, but the 98 boot disk did not detect the CD-ROM. When I tried to run the driver installation program that came with the computer, it said that the program could not be installed unless Windows was open. I was caught in a Catch-22 (needed CD-ROM to install Windows, but needed Windows to install CD-ROM). Eventually, I just scrapped the CD-ROM and used one from another computer and it worked fine.

AJ