detect cdrom without recompling the kernel
 

I am still running Sarge. Going to upgrade to 5.0.3 in a few days.
Can one get the system to detect and run a cdrom that is not listed in
/dev without recompiling the kernel. The cdrom is recoginzed with the
installation disk and appears to be working properly

Not sure. But you're going to have to update the kernel anyway. Or you could try an install from hard disk.

Are you planning on doing an upgrade from Sarge to Etch first? Or just jumping from Sarge to Lenny? I've not had success skipping a release (I tried Woody to Etch on an old box once and it failed miserably). So you might need to do an intermediate upgrade. Here's the release notes (with upgrade info) from Debian.

my goal right now is to see if I can get the cdrom working with
sarge. I plan to do a new install, so this is just an exercise right now.

Sure, if it's detected by the installer, that means the modules are available. You can do a "modprobe <module-name>", and get it going (probably), without compiling the module into the kernel.

What's the output of "lspci"??

i was able to get recognized by modprobe ide-generic.
I am sure I tried this before, but it is working now.