why does it not see either of the CD drives? Both CDs & both HDs are acknowledged by BIOS on startup.
For a CD-ROM drive to properly work in MS-DOS, it is required that the CD-ROM drivers be loaded in the Autoexec.bat / Config.sys.
Below are examples of the format of how the drivers should be loaded in the autoexec.bat and config.sys.
AUTOEXEC.BAT:
LOADHIGH=C: \Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001
CONFIG.SYS:
DEVICEHIGH=C: \CD-ROM\NEC_IDE.SYS /D:MSCD001
Bear in mind that the location and name of the relevant device driver (nnnnn.sys) will vary dependent on your configuration - e.g. it may be on the floppy disk. Also you may not be using high memory, in which case just use Load and Device.
SD