Sorry for posting this again, but there really was no response to my last post. I have a Toshiba 410CDT with a Toshiba CD-Rom which connects into the external drive port thingie. Now here's the problem - the toshy won't detect the cd-rom and i am in desperate need of putting win95 on it at the moment.
Any help is appreciated.

Here's what I thought of (I felt sorry for you because no-one had posted):
The cd-rom may be screwed. Try it on another comp to see.
The various cables maybe screwed. Try it on another comp to see.
The m-board's port may be screwed. Who knows how to tell whether it's this (laptop's are cheesey)
Could be a software problem. Unless you want to format etc, hard to test.
Could be a hardware-software problem- incompatibilities etc. Or the BIOS is weird.
The comp is overheating (very unlikely but I thought I'd stick it in anyway)

I've just listed everything that I thought it could be. Tell us the OS, tell us whether it works on another comp, tell us how old it is, tell us the specs of the laptop. Just copy and paste if it's in your other post, I'm not sure that I read it. You might have tried a few of these things already, but who cares, I had to cover everything.

Dude, thanks for the help. I tried all that, but everything worked perfectly. In the end, I swapped the fd and cd, did a lot of fucking around with the damn thing and FINALLY it worked. Turns out the bastard I got it from put the cd in a fd-only casing.

That's pretty dumb, I must say