I suppose the physical CD is good enough to work properly. Did you try swapping the CD-ROM drives? You could just copy over the files from the other computer to rule out an issue with the installer. You could also ensure that no other kinds of TSRs are loaded than the minimum. For example, no smart drive.

Try MSCDEX. That shsucdx is nice but is really not 100% compatible and sometimes gives trouble. The same thing is with Microsoft mouse 8.20 versus cutemouse.

Smartdrv is not loaded.
Treid minimum config: himem.sys, cdrom.sys, prompt, ms-dos mouse, mscdex. No Luck.
Tried Mscdex. No Luck
Burned a CD-RW with an image from REMOVED SO CALLED ABANDONWARE SITE. Still same error.
Treied vide-cdd. No Luck.
Error Message on German:
Datenträger-Fehler: A= Abbruch, R=Erneut versuchen.

Any further suggestions?
The Mainboard is an ASRock K7VM2 with a AMD CPU.

I second the suggestion of REMOVED. At the very least use REMOVED instead of REMOVED to give the drive a better chance of reading it.

What other titles have you tried? Did any of those give you similar issues? (Probably most efficient to look for ones that read as much as possible as early as possible, i.e. have them do a full installation etc.)

Tried today
another DVD/CD Drive
another IDE Cable
another RAM.
All with the original CD and a CD burned from the iso-File from the REMOVED SO CALLED ABANDONWARE SITE.
Same Error.

Installed the game on another PC with exactly the same hardware. Works at first shot!
Installing Dos from scratch on the first PC now...

Maybe the IDE controller is botched...

No, it isn't.
Installed from scratch and it's working fine now!
The cause must have been the name after the /D: switch of cdrom.sys and mscdex.
I typed "cdrom". I have a directory on my diskette with the same name which I can't enter or delete then.
If i want to copy a file named cdrom.sys from the diskette to the harddisk, it says: "the file is already there" and you can't "overwrite" it.
I cannot remember which name i gave the cd-driver, but it must have matched a file from the warcraft 2 installation CD.
This was a tough nut to crack. Do you agree?
Thanks for all the help.
Greetings
Ralf

Ah goddammit, not this one again. Microsoft and its r*tarded "magic names"... Reminds me of that one Windows boot floppy using "banana" for the CD drive device name, which then broke Windows 9x Plus' Setup trying to unpack its "banana.ani"... And then there's many other quasi-hardcoded ones, like LPT1, NUL, COM1. Can't use those for file names, and can't change them either without removing the respective port altogether. Why? Because f*ck you that's why.

Glad you got it working.

Except in this case the name was chosen by the user, not MS...

True. But I still say that regardless where they came from, device names and file names shouldn't interfere. Imagine if you couldn't name a file "C.txt" because C's a drive letter? They solved that by making the drive "C:", why not do that, or sth similar, for devices too?

Looked at the files on the harddisk after installation.
Can't say that any filename could be the one I choosed for the cdrom.sys.
Strange.