large-capacity hard drive partitioning

i'm building a system using a epox mobo,and am having trouble getting it to boot the o.s. more than once.my main hassle seems to be that the
system might be accessing the wrong area of the h.d. to boot from...it's a 6-gig drive,but i didn't pmake use of all the space by setting up artitions on all the availible space.

Depends. Early versions of Win95 only support partitions up to 2 gig. Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 and later support drives larger
than 2 GB using the FAT32 file system. If you can use FAT32, then partitioning is up to you. To increase performance, some people like to create a second partition to hold the swap file.

Yes the drive should be partition and formatted before loading the operation sys
Usem startup disk to FDISK
follow the onscreen instructions to partition the drive
Reboot,type Format C:
After format you can run setup with cd-rom support

As the other respondents said, the HD does need to be partitioned prior to installing the OS.

What you need to do depends on whick version of 95 you have. Only version 2.5 "C" has fat32 support. If you have the original boot disk, you can tell when you run fdisk, as it will ask if you want to enable support for large drives.
If you are not asked the question, you do not have the fat32 version of 95. Fat16 is limited to 2GB per drive partition.

I suspect that you have a drive formated for fat32, but have a fat16 version of 95.

If you are willing to start over from scratch, do the following;

Boot from a floppy, run fdisk and delete all logical drives and partitions.
Re-boot. Run fdisk again, say no to support for large drives.
Create a primary dos partition. make it as large as you can (2147 MB I think)
Create an extended dos partition. Use the rest of the drive.
Create at least 2 logical drives in the extended partition.
Reboot and format the c drive.
You should now be able to install windows and have it run.