From your description it seems most likely that both the floppy and CD drive
have about reached the end of their useful life, and are simply not working
very well. It might be possible to improve performance by using the
appropriate cleaning disk on each of them, but these are components that
wear out, and sometimes they just have to be replaced. .
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Blohm" wrote in message
...
I have a Toshiba Satellite 2545CDS laptop that includes a floppy disk drive
(a and a CDROM drive (d. (1) I cannot access these drives properly.
The
floppy disk drive can read some floppy disks and not others. Some disks
it
signals as not properly formatted, others it states it cannot access. The
CDROM drive can access audio disks but the disks spin only very slowly and
the playback gets interrupted the way buffering interrupts streaming
audio.
The CDROM drive cannot access data disks right now, although it used to if
I
could get the CD to spin at full speed. Accordingly, now when I boot the
computer with the Windows 98 2nd edition disk in the drive, the CDROM
drive
does not spin the disk at high speed and fails to read the disk. When I
put
the Startup Diskette in the floppy drive there is no result. (2) Also
Norton
Antivirus cannot access the (c hard drive's master boot records when I
run
a virus scan.

Otherwise, Windows 98 2nd edition is working properly. All external
modems
are working properly (PCMCIA card to access internet and dial-up modem).
I'm
worried about when it comes time to do an over-the-top reinstall of the
operating system: no access to the floppydisk/CD drives.

I have not "run" the SFC (system file checker). The last time I did, and
corrected a couple of found errors, it caused me to have to do an
over-the-top reinstall of Windows 98 2nd edition. There was not a problem
with the floppydisk/CD drives then, which developed gradually and suddenly
reached the current dire state. I have 700 MB of free memory on the 4 GB
hard drive. A year ago I had the CDROM drive checked by a Toshiba service
center when it was reading audio intermittently and still accessing data
CDs,
but I had only 200 MB of free space on the hard drive then. They told me
the
problem was due to insufficient free space in the hard drive.

Recently I installed a stick-memory driver for the USB port. Could that
driver be interfering with access to floppies and CDs?

On the "Setup" screen (in DOS prior to Windows bootup) there is no mention
of installation of the FDD (floppy disk drive) or the CDROM drive, except
for
mention of the boot order of CDROM--FDD--Hard disk.