Still no CD drive showing up on my desktop

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You do know nothing will show up until you put a disk in the drive, right?
The exception to that is a utility to probe the SCSI chain for devices. SCSI Probe is one such; so are Drive Setup and Apple HD SC Setup.

I've checked in the extensions folder (I can't seem to find the extensions disabled folder) and the SCSI extension is in there, as is the Apple CD player one

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I don't think Extensions (disabled) gets created until you use Extensions Manager for the first time and ... disable some extensions. Doesn't matter.

Apple CD Player may be the audio player. There are other extensions that are needed, but I can't remember them off the top of my head. There might also be control panels. What we need here is someone with a working 7.5 machine with a CD drive who can tell you exactly what is needed. That or a link to an old Apple tech support note ...

eventually gently held the drive head down on the disk with a pencil, and got it to save to the hard drive

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8-o I salute you, sir.