CD Rom drive was working yesterday; ALTHOUGH it did seem to be noisy.  Today, when I click to run D:, it says drive is not ready.  When I put in a disk, the light comes on in the drive for quiet a while like it wants to start, but then the light GOES back down to c: drive.  None of my disks are being recognized, not even the cleaning disk.  

I am running 98 on an emachine with 32 mb.  A: drive is working as usual.

Before this trouble, I made changes to the desktop and display properties.  Put the underwater theme on with the fish screen saver.
Did you install your CD-ROM drive on another computer yet to check wheter it is operative or not?
go to my computer icon right click on it  properties tab .. click that then click the DEVICE manager you will the see the cdrom icon click the plus sign then the icon  then properties ....settings tab click that ..and see if the auto insert notification box is ticked also the dma box is ticked also....a short to this is msdos prompt scanreg/restore..if you wish to use this option come back for more INFO on how..toRaptor..  I pulled a cd rom out of another old computer, plugged it in and it worked like a charm.  Thanks for the hint.  

At first, it was pretty scary pulling all those wires loose, but I was sure shouting after I plugged everything back in and it worked.  I'm learning a lot from this forum.