Question : cdr101 not ready reading drive d: abort retry fail?

    My son's computer is cluttered with dubious downloads and possible viruses or trojans.  I would like to reformat the hard drive and re-install Windows, but the problem is that Windows 98 no longer recognizes the cd drive. "Windows Explorer", "Device Manager", and "Add New Hardware" all act as though there is no cd-rom.  When I tried rebooting with the computer manufacturer's (Dell) boot diskette (choosing option 2, for starting the computer with cd recognition), DOS would allow me to change directory to drive d:, but then any command from there resulted in error "cdr101--Not ready reading Drive D: Abort Retry Fail?".
     There was no new hardware that made this happen.  The cd drive used to work, and now it doesn't.
     Thinking maybe there was a hardware failure of the cd-rom drive, (though my initial suspicion, as noted above, was that there is a problem with something he downloaded, maybe messing some key files), I purchased a new Buslink cd-rw (48x) drive.  Unfortunately, we still have the same problems-- Windows 98 does not recognize the drive, and booting from diskette results in exactly the same thing-- I can switch to drive d:, but commands still result in cdr101.
     I tried downloading what's described as the Windows98 cdrw driver from the Buslink website, and ran its setup program.  This did not change anything.  I presume that there is a *.sys file created somewhere by this, but it's not explicitly in what's downloaded and wherever setup puts it, Windows isn't using it.  Maybe I have to put some reference to this *.sys file in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files, but I'm not sure the name or location of the *.sys file or exactly how to do this.  Everything for the new cdrw seems to assume that Windows recognizes the drive, but the whole problem is that it does not.
     Any suggestions for what to try next would be most welcome.

Answer : cdr101 not ready reading drive d: abort retry fail?

Try to make a 95 or 98 bootable floppy by download from www.bootdisk.com . The CD drivers supplied works for almost all CD units. If the CD is not recognised during POST, you may need to check hardware (cabling OK, jumpering consistent with intended master/slave configuration, power cables all tight) and BIOS setup settings for the IDE channels (autodetect for all units may be a good setting).

Regards
/RID