cd-rom Help!!!

[fti International]

Dear All,   I am tring to install Debian on an old pc (486).   The BIOS on the old pc does not allow me to boot from cd-rom and does not recognize the existence of the cd-rom drive.  It does not allow me to specifiy the cd-rom on the BIOS setup menu.  There are two IDE adapters (0 and 1) with master and slave for each.  But all of them are _predefined_ for specifying hard disks.    So I installed the base of Linux using floppies.   Now I want to install the packages from the official Debain cd-roms.  When I run the "apt-setup" and choose the cd-rom option, it asks me to give the device name for the cd-rom. I think the cd-rom on my pc is an IDE deice, so I tried "/dev/hdb", "/dev/hdc", and "/dev/hdc".  All of them resulted in an error like   " ...not recognized by kernel as a block devie"   So what is the soltion here?  Do I have to   (1) somehow make the BIOS to recognize the cd-rom and then     reinstall the Linux base?  or (2) somehow just load relevant device drivers to the current     system (if so, how?)? or (3) something else?   Any help is greately appreciated.  -Cong