DOS not reading CDR/RW

My husband and I decided that with all the problems we were having with Windows XP we wanted to load Window 98 back on our computer. In looking into this I found that the only way to do that was to reformat the hard drive and start fresh so that's what we did. Now when I start the computer the CD drive will light up but it's not reading. The system knows that it's a CDR/RW drive but it's not reading. What do I need to do to fix this?

Thanks.

If it's windows 98 SE, you don't need DOS. The CD should be bootable. Just set the CD boot option in your BIOS.

If it isn't bootable, you'll need a DOS bootdisk with an oak cdrom driver. You can probably get one from www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one handy.

The drive is set up in BIOS and it does run but it's not reading. Not sure why or how to fix.

If the disk is bootable and the drive is not reading it, then I would say either the disk is dirty or defective, or the cdrw is bad. If you're able to burn a copy of win98 on another computer, you may want to try that. Or try booting to floppy then accessing the cdrom drive. You can do this by making a bootable disk with cdrom support from the bootdisk site.