Windows 95, as old as it is, suffers from it's own
interesting form of software rot.
Over the past 2 years, and in over
6 different machines (one of my own posession, and 5 of friends and family), I have noticed a similar behavior in many machines with
Windows 95 installed.
At any point, during a period of no less than one up to three years after it was installed (regardless of the amount of use), Windows 95 (
A, B, and C!) will eventually "forget" that the machine has a CD-ROM drive.
Yes, the OS will one day up and forget,
forever, that your machine has a CD-ROM drive. Nor will it ever see a new installation, should you add a new one. You can take a boot disk with
DOS, generic CD-ROM drivers, and MSCDEX, and see the drive just fine.
I'm not aware if this problem is documented, but I do know that it is irreversible (loading DOS drivers before windows loads does not work, nor does reloading the windows driver), and the only fix is to reload the OS. The irony in this being that Windows 95 was the first Microsoft OS to be distributed primarily on CD-ROM