I just got a Gateway E3200 Pentium ii desktop and the first thing I did was try to boot into freedos 1.3 burned to a cd-r. The bios recognizes the sony cd-rw drive just fine, but wont boot the disc. The drive definitely works and the disc boots in my modern tower. I used a freedos ssd from another machine and it will boot to that, and on startup successfully mounts the drive as d: but when I try to access the disc it says drive not ready. I made another ssd with everything it needed to install windows 98 and that worked. Windows has the drive in the device manager and mounts it as drive d:, but also says drive not ready when I try to access it.