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  • January 28, 2000 at 1:02 pm #2082941

    Reformat harddrive,what next?

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    by averytoledo · about 25 years, 2 months ago

    i have a laptop and i reformatted the hard drive. but i turned it off after the reformating. now when i turn it on it says invalid system disk replace and press any key. the laptop only has a cd rom attached to it. i tried putting the win 95 cd intoit but it will not load. how should i proceed next. my goal is to load win 95 on to it. what do i do? how do i get a dos prompt? the cd rom is noticed by the laptop however when i put cd in it the cd rom just keeps blinking.

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    • January 28, 2000 at 2:02 pm #3896966

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by zbrain75 · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      Try setting your bios to boot from the CD-ROM. When the system begins to boot and test memory and hardware, you should be able to enter bios, by pressing something like . Once in BIOS search for where you set your boot sequence, and set it toboot from CD-ROM first. Then when you boot, it should load and start the install package on the CD.

    • January 28, 2000 at 2:08 pm #3896965

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by wanderer · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      You don’t have a system loaded on your laptop, if you have a win 95 boot disk, put it in the A: drive and boot the PC. At the dos prompt type: “sys c:” without the quotes, and hit enter. This will transfer the system files to your hard drive and you will be able to boot to the C: drive. But, I assume you are trying to load win95 on your pc, not just get it to boot. There are a couple of options depending on your hardware configuration. The easiest thing to do is have a friend with win98 makeyou a start up disk. A win98 startup disk will give you the option of booting your pc with CD Rom support.
      1. Boot to win98 start up disk
      2. Select Command prompt with CD Rom support 3. Insert win95 cd
      4. change directories to the CD Rom (probably the E:\ drive)
      5. Run Setup.exe

      An other option is to add dos CD Rom drivers to your win95 boot disk, which is a bit more work.

      If your PC will boot from the CD Rom, then buy a win98 cd(unlike the win95 cd, it is bootable) or have a friend burn you a bootable

    • January 28, 2000 at 2:11 pm #3896964

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by clwicks · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      Well now you know why you don’t turn a machine off after reformatting the hard drive until you put the operating system back on it. If you have the ability and have a cable, emergency boot disk and a 3-1/2′ floppy you can reboot the machine by temporarily installing the floppy on the motherboard of the laptop while you install the core components of the operating system (this may require a reformat in order to go through the procedure step-by- step utilizing the F-Disk utility). You should beable to do this without disconnecting your CD-ROM drive. Once this is completed you should be able to put your Windows CD in the drive and install Windows with no problem. After you complete the entire install/reboot/reboot cycle. Disconnect the floppy drive and replace the cast. You better ground yourself well because you will be working with the machine on and open. If you have any doubt about what you are doing, I seriously suggest that you take the machine to a qualified tech and let them reinstall your op

    • January 28, 2000 at 5:45 pm #3896961

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by stewart1001 · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      When you start your boot process, and it says press Del to run setup press the Del key, and then find where you put the boot sequence in and change that to put the CDROM first, and then exit and save. Always note any changes that you make in this selection, so you can always revert back to what it was. Then insert the Win95 CD in to the CDROM drive, and it should ask you if you would like to run the Win95 setup.. This only works if you have a new enough version of BIOS.. I wish you luck with your laptop.

    • January 28, 2000 at 11:47 pm #3896959

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by jptech · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      Ok, they are definatly right about setting your pc to boot from the cd-rom drive if you don’t have an external floppy drive you can hook up to the system, some ways to enter a bios are “del” key, “F2” key, “CTRL + Alt + Enter”, etc. Once you enter the BIOS there should be an option like “Advanced” or something like that, u may need to search around, you should then see a boot priority option or boot sequence option, make sure it is set to “CD-Rom, Floppy (FDD), Hard Drive (HDD). When your done, you will want to switch it back to Floppy, Hard Drive.
      Now, I’m not sure if the win95 cd is bootable, but I know the win98 and win98se ones are, so if win95 isn’t you could use one of those ones. After you boot off the cd it will most likely load the windows setup.
      And a tip if you ever format again, make sure u don’t power off the system, and always format with this switch “Format c: /s”
      That will make the c: drive bootable. Also it is a good idea to have cd-rom drivers in your autoexec.bat and config.sys on

    • January 29, 2000 at 2:40 am #3896957

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by rattlesnake1 · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      First Question what kind of Labtop is it, Second goto home page of the make of your labtop and find out what they recommend to do, reason for this is that every manufacture is different. Once you have done this delete partition and reformat then follow manufacture instruction.

    • January 29, 2000 at 4:50 pm #3896938

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by brent · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      If you just formatted the HD, the first thing you have to do if create a partition, make it active, reboot, format the partition with the s option. Now you are ready to load your win95. If possible set your bios to boot from the CD and upgrade to win98. Contact you hardware vendor and get the special drivers for you notebook. Good Luck.

    • January 30, 2000 at 12:18 am #3896933

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by aplustoz · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      You stated that you only have a CD ROM attached to your laptop, implying that you do not have a floppy drive. You also stated that you are trying to install Windows95 on your computer.

      Unless Windows95 has changed really recently, it is not bootable from a CD, so this pretty much limits your options (in my estimation) to:

      1: Adding a floppy drive and booting from a floppy.

      2: Taking your Windows95 CD to a friend who has a CD Recorder, and have them copy your Win95 Directory in full onto a blank CD and adding system files to that CD, then boot to the CD (setup your boot options in CMOS as you were instructed by others previously), copy your system files to your hard drive, then go to your Win95 directory on your CD-ROM and type SETUP.

      3: Find someone who has a Windows 98 CD-ROM, and boot from that, then switch to your Windows 95 CD, then type setup at your DOS prompt.

    • January 30, 2000 at 1:04 am #3896932

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by vinnyd · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      One Easy way to fix this is to get a 2 1/2 inch drive adpater to plug you lpatop hard drive into a full size computer.

      Then you can format the disk again with the /s (system) option to make it bootable. Then you must load the real-mode CD-ROM driver for you laptop hard drive.

      After that, you can re-install the hard drive and boot from the harddisk in the laptop. That will give you access to the cd and be able to load win95 again.

    • January 31, 2000 at 1:58 am #3896918

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by hjs · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      I aggree with answer #9. As far as I know w95 cd is not bootable, but w98SE is. Do the basics ie: fdisk and set your active partition, go into BIOS setup and change the boot order to cd rom first and off you go.

    • January 31, 2000 at 2:08 am #3896917

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by chau_tuyen · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      make sure you format the drive with command : “format drive: /s” next time. that will boot the computer to c: prompt. if you win95 boot disk and cd boot disk wont work then the only way to have is the original system disk that come with the Manufacture.

    • January 31, 2000 at 7:24 am #3896899

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by ramon · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      Hi,

      Go to a friend’s computer running windows 98 on it and create a startup disk. Also make sure that your A:\ drive is the first to boot, place diskette on drive a:\ and answer boot with cd-rom capabilities, this way you’ll install the cd-rom drivers, go to your c:\ drive and make a directorie call CABS (md cabs), then copy the WIN98 directorie from your cd-rom into your cabs directorie on your c:\ drive (then type the following x:\(where the x =cd-rom letter)copy win98 c:cabs, when finish copying the cabs files pull cd-disk from cd-rom and change directorie to c:\ cabs then from here type SETUP and you’re on your way.

    • February 1, 2000 at 1:35 am #3896884

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by doc598 · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      It says “Invalid System Disk” when you boot up because there is no operating system on the boot disk. This might be a dumb question but, do you have a restore CD for the laptop? If you do set the machine to boot from CD and boot with that in the CD Drive and follow the prompts. Otherwise I agree with the other suggestions that you use a Win 98 Bootable Floppy to boot and use that to access the CD Drive.

    • February 10, 2000 at 10:26 am #3897302

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by medwards · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      I believe you formatted the drive without the /s switch which would have made the hard drive bootable. When you turn on the laptop, go into the setup (or CMOS) and see if you can make the first startup device to be the CD-ROM drive. If this is notpossible, find a DOS disk and boot from that. You will need a bootable diskette with a config.sys and autoexec.bat that will load and launch your particular CD-ROM driver. This will allow the laptop to see the CD drive. At this point, you should be able to install Windows. Hope this helps.

    • February 17, 2000 at 5:15 am #3897790

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by bionicdog · about 25 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      your best bet is to restart your machine and go into your bios setup by probably pressing the delete key and changing your boot sequence to the cd-rom drive and then save it and restart your computer while having the cd-rom inside the computer and then go ahead and start the set-up

    • February 28, 2000 at 10:21 pm #3900543

      Reformat harddrive,what next?

      by dmitry · about 25 years, 1 month ago

      In reply to Reformat harddrive,what next?

      You must have startup disk of windows 95 or 98 when you’ll boot from this disk you must type a:\sys c:
      then you’ll be able to boot from hard drive, but you have formated it, so files you are missed try some floppy for installation of cd-rom drive’sdrivers, after installed cd-rom device drivers, reboot, insert win 9x setup CD type cd d:\win95 or d:\win98 then type setup

      PS:
      D: – letter of your cd-rom drive
      best regards

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