I have a laptop with a cd-rom drive but no floppy drive. It had some serious problems so i found my 95 disc and my key and verified that it was readable through cd rom..i did a format on the HDD and now i do have the disc in the rom drive but when it is booting up it says system disc error and that is it...it will not let me get to a prompt to do anything, it will not or doesn't seem to read directly from the drive, i was able to get into the bios and make sure that it is set to boot sequence of the rom then the HDD. so all that would seem to be fine, i have even downloaded the boot disc on cd and that didn't even seem to have any change. Please help, i really dont want to spend money on this to buy a used floppy drive, it is just for my younger kids to mess with. Thanks in advance.

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Hi Brandon:

I think you're going to have to buy that plug-in
floppy drive.  If your computer is like my Toshiba,
the plug-in floppy drive is bootable, but beware
that some after-market plug-in floppy drives (the
kind that plug into the parallel port) aren't
bootable.

The problem is that the Win95 installation CDs had
no bootable OS on them.  Even if your BIOS can
"see" the CD without special drivers, there's
nothing on that CD to boot.

Another option is to pull the hard drive out of
the old computer, put it in a working computer
as a slave drive, format and partition it, and put
enough DOS on it to get it to boot itself when you
put it back in the old computer.

Jerry

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How did you format the drive Brandon?

You should have use Format c: /s this will copy the system files to c: these are 
needed to boot up. Your best bet  as Jerry suggested is to try and get a plug-in 
floppy drive.

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I formated by doing "format c:" and that was it, i didn't leave any system files on there it would seem. Can i use win98 boot "disc" to get up and then use the win95 "disc" for install of the operating system?

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I think that could work, yes. Doesn't hurt to try.

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On Monday, December 11, 2006 at 9:46 am, Brandon wrote:
|I formated by doing "format c:" and that was it, i didn't leave any system files 
on there it would seem.

Yes but where was Format.com? Floppy, Hard drive?

|Can i use win98 boot "disc" to get up and then use the win95 "disc" for install 
of the operating system?

How can you use a Win98 boot disk if you don't have a floppy drive? Win98 CD's are 
bootable. 

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It is possible to use FORMAT C: to wipe a hard
drive -- even the hard drive the FORMAT.COM file
lives on.  When you start FORMAT.COM, the entire
executable gets sucked up into memory, and runs
from there.  When it's done working (i.e., wiping
the hard drive), the memory-residency terminates,
returning control to COMMAND.COM -- but by then
COMMAND.COM is gone, along with everything else,
including the original FORMAT.COM file.

Jerry

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