how do I load cd rom in ms-dos mode

wow someone who actualy wants to use dos i'm impresed
if your tring to get the drive working while in the basic dos environment aka never booted to win than u need to play with lots of stuff to get it working and a boot disk would be your best bet, windows can make you a dos boot disk with cd drivers
if you are having issues while in a terminal mode of dos while in windows it is a setup problem with the dos window and you need to adjust the proberties of the terminal run

comp 1----------------comp 2---------------------comp3
dell 4300-----------home brewed---------------ibm 4300
1gig ram---------3gig ecc ddr ram------------96mb ram
GF2 Ti-------------voodoo 5 6000---------------terminals
----------------(the 4 proc 128mb one)
shared kds xf9p 19" flat tube trinitron----------terminals
40gb WD 7200--ibm 120gxp 80gb-------ibm 3420 tape
8gb ibm 7200--ibm 120gxp 80gb------------8 drives
6gb segate7200--------------------------------1.6gb total
TB santa cruz---herc game theat XP-----------i wish
bethany audio 1500watt rms 2.1 system rated@135db
creative 2x dvd----creative 12xdvd---------------nope
scsi yamaha 24xcdr--LG 32x cdr----------------nope
------------------------2nd LG 32x cdr
usb win modem-----quad 56k hardware
linksys 100tx fiber--linksys 100tx fiber ------100tx fiber
win 2k pro-----------2k pro & red 7.3------------cobal

to answer your question yes i have a working ibm mainframe from the early 80's running a rewritten version of cobal that is 2k complient

Thanks for the advice. I'll give that a try tonight. I'm assuming it's pretty easy to make a boot disk from Win 98.