Reformat harddrive,what next?

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.