Installer needs CDROM driver *after* successfully reading and loading from CDROM
 

My Compaq Presario 1260 loads and runs the setup CD, *but* at some point the setup says that it can't find a driver for the CDROM drive which is a Toshiba XM-7002B. I'm left with a scroll box of *many* misc drivers from WiFi to SCSI to USB, etc, but nothing that looks useful for the CDROM.

How much ram do you have? Are you attempting to install Mandrake 7.1 or a newer version? IIRC modern distros like mandriva, fedora and ubuntu require a minimum 64MB of ram for the installer to run.

I *have* win98 and Mandrake 7.1 dual booting. Mandrake doesn't recognize the ethernet and WiFi PCMCIA cards and the Touch Pad is flacky, but it installed and works.

I'm trying to install Mandriva 10.0!

The laptop does have 64 MB of RAM and its running a AMD K6.

The CDROM is a Toshiba XM-1802B that windows98 reports "No driver files are required or have been loaded for this device".

The CDROM works for the boot of Mandriva, but then during the Install it complanes that it cannot find it and then provides a scroll box with a number of drivers for misc devices.

This would indicate that once the kernel loads and takes over from the bios, the kernel does not detect the optical drive any longer. I had an old sony laptop that was prone to the same behavior. There could be a lot of reasons for that. In my case it was because of a weird nonstandard proprietary bus hook up that sony used for the optical drive. In your case it's probably due to the via chipset motherboard on that laptop. These were always problematic back in the day. Sometimes passing various boot parameters would help get around these problems but a quick google didn't turn anything up. The only alternative would be to find a distro that has a kernel compatible with your hardware.

However, I think you are really barking up the wrong tree here. Even if you somehow managed to get mdk10 to install, running it would be an exercise in frustration. Your hardware is just too limited, especially your ram. I would recommend something slackware based like Vector Linux Light:

http://vectorlinux.com/downloads

The light edition is designed to run in as little as 64MB of ram. Also, checking over on the Linux on Laptops site, I saw several examples of people successfully installing older versions of slackware on presario 1200 series laptops:

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/compaq.html

which gives me some hope that the slackware kernel will like your hardware better. Be sure you download the Light edition.