Windows 95 CD wont boot?

Clarifications

You need to use a bootable floppy.
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Insure FDISK is on this thing. You will need to make a partition manually.

Next, you will need to make sure you have no more than 512MB of RAM
Next, depending on if you have 95B or 95C. You will have to make several small partitions, or up to 32 gigs of space for FAT32. If your drive is larger than 32Gigs, only 32 will be usable, even if you partition it.

After using fdisk, booting the floppy, it will probably make a CD drive called R:
type R:\Setup
This should launch the setup for Windows 95. Follow the prompts.
You may need to set your BIOS to a compatibility mode, which usually slows timing and removes hardware BIOS shadowing. You can re-enable optimum mode after you are done installing.
If you are using Win95B, you may not support FAT32, only FAT16, and therefore will need convert it to FAT32 after it is installed (there will be a tool in your start menu to do this)

Good luck finding drivers for your hardware.

No, you would boot from floppy disk (either built-in, if your laptop has a built-in floppy drive, or from a USB floppy drive). Then you would use fdisk on the floppy to create the partitions you want, format the hard drive, create C:\Windows\options\cabs, copy the contents of the CD's cabs folder to that location, then run setup.exe from C:\windows\options\cabs.

Also, you might want to put the Windows CD in another computer and make sure you can read it. It's always possible the CD has suffered bit rot over the years. If it's unreadable, email me (lordpeyre at yahoo.com) and I'll see what I can do to help.

Required a Floppy Disc to make it usable.

Those Install Disc's never booted directly they always used a Floppy to start the Install process.

If you want to use 95 you need a Floppy Drive to start the Install Sequence.

Col

it used a boot floppy emulation
it would boot to DOS mode and get assigned A:
and only 1.45 MB of data was visible
and it was the same contents as on the 98 boot floppy

when you boot with CDROM support
you still got A: and the rest of the CD was available at the CD-ROM Drive letter
usually D:, E: or higher depending on installed HDs and whether or not they were partitioned into multiple drives

Follow that advice as he (she?) is exactly right. Yes, Win 98 was the first to boot directly, AS A general rule. But I know of SOME Win 95 OEM disks that were bootable, (Usually into a repair type option), and at least one LATE Win 95 disk version that would, but it was after the OSR2... With USB support, & FAT 32 support. Some early Win 95 versions only supported Fat 16... And trust us, you do not want that one! ("Normal" Floppies are Fat 12, BTW) A far better option would be at LEAST Win 98se, at a minimum... Why Win 95? Almost nothing works with it now. Or even better, a Linux distro intended for older hardware. There are many, but one of my personal favorites for older (vintage!) Hardware is Puppy Linux. It won't give you a lot of the bells and whistles, but it WILL work with more modern OS'es (in networking) on other machines, and a combination of old and newer hardware, like, your old laptop, and a webcam built yesterday morning! It also can read, and write, to a wider variety of disk file types. Win 95 can read and write, depending on version, only fat 16 or that and fat 32. (And floppies, which as I said, are Fat 12) But that's it. NO NT! Anything written by a later OS, like Win XP or later, won't show up.

With the rare OEM exception (best bet revision C, but it may only install on the machine for which it is intended), no 95 CD is bootable. Get a USB floppy drive if you are serious about trying. You may have better luck installing it in a VM.

It is unlikely that there will be drivers for your hardware, you will not be able to run modern apps, - heck, it probably won't even support your processor. You probably need a 486 or early Pentium. A Vista machine is not nearly old enough.

You can try installing a free DOS which can be installed from CD, then run the Win95 setup from the installed DOS.
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+dos+bootable+install+CD

I bought a $7 usb floppy drive and i think I have a few floppys laying around some where. So all I have to do is put the windows 95 bootdisk SinisterSlay mentioned on it then boot from it, would it even have a boot option since its external?, and have the windows 95 CD in the computer at the same time to boot?

You need to find drivers, I recall you saying this was a laptop, so your chances are even slimmer.

And even if you are successful, what do you intend to use this machine for? Windows 95 gets a virus the moments after you hook it up to the net, there are so many viruses still in the wild for it. Last I read, only Avast worked on Win95, and its iffy and kills performance. Only Opera Browser version 8 worked on Win95. I can get you a download of IE5.5SP2. If you have version C of 95, it should include IE4 on the disk, installing that will allow you to do the desktop update. Which will give you almost all the visual functionality as Windows 98.

So no drivers, no virus scanners, no usable browsers.

So unless you are intending to play some legacy games on this (nVidia and ATI both maintain their old driver websites, so you might get lucky) it will be a useless machine.

Get with the times. You need virtualization. Use DOSBox to run old DOS games in Win7:
http://www.dosbox.com/

If the games are not DOS games and you REALLY need Win95 then you might want to try installing Win95 in a VirtualBox:
http://www.virtualbox.org/

You can actually boot in to any DOS boot CD that has CD-ROM drivers like PC-DOS and then run the Win95 setup but it just won't run on modern hardware. You need an old computer too. Not sure what this laptop is but virtualization will be easier every time.

The laptop is an old acer aspire single core with 1 gb ram (2 sticks) so i would be able to lower the ram and it should run just fine.

Another option is to remove the hard drive, format it as a bootable drive and copy the Windows 95 CD to the hard drive.

Use a USB drive adapter and format the hard drive as a bootable FAT16 volume. Remember that Windows 95 only supports a maximum of 2GB per partition. You may need to create a lot of logical drives to be able to use your entire hard drive.

Then, create a folder on the drive named WIN95, and copy the CD to that folder.

Place the drive back in the laptop.

When you boot up, you should get a DOS prompt.
Type in CD WIN95
Then setup
The Windows 95 installer should start.

But, before you even start, make sure you can find Windows 95 drivers for any hardware you want to use. This is the tough part of installing old versions of Windows on new hardware, you may not have drivers.

Also, just what do you plan to use this system for? Unless you have old software you want to use, this system is going to be pretty useless.

Chas

I used to have a very old Mk ll 3.8 Jaguar. no power steering, no air con, leaded petrol, no air bags, drum brakes etc. More hours spent maintaining than driving. Used to rust at the first thought of rain.

Lots of my friends questioned me as to why I should drive it as I couldn't get spares, tax and insurance were expensive, petrol consumption was awful, reliability was poor, etc.

It was fun to drive!

So please, answer the question not question the motive.

I keep an old samsung P3 laptop with Win 98 as it doesnt run on XP properly.
It is the scariest game EVER.
You must try it on your 95 laptop.
Its why the 9x's were invented.
Not for business or boring rubbish like spreadsheets.
You will need a floppy despite what everybody says.
It was made that way to work that way.
I still shuddr when I think of how many floppies got corrupted so quickly, even when they were new.
And just to make matters worse USB is not recognised by 9x so forget usb floppy drives.
Try doing a rain dance.
You might get lucky but its best to put 9x on a lappy with a built in floppy.
I have given up trying to do what you are trying to do.
Wish I could give you good news but I think you are going to have a whole heap of trouble.
Peoples memories seem very short about 9x on a non floppy PC.
I hope I am wrong.
Good luck.