Can't load Windows 95 OS

[Uncle Ronnie]

I re-formatted the hard drive of my IBM Thinkpad (old, Pentium I machine). My Windows boot disk gives me an A prompt, but when I try to switch to the D drive (where the Win 95 disk is), I get an error message. How can I get around this?

[osprey4]

And the error message is..........?

[Bill in SD, CA]

Welcome to TechIMO!!

Your CD ROM may have been kicked up a letter because of the RAM drive.

Try E:\ or other letters

[Uncle Ronnie]

the error message is: "invalid drive specification"

[Uncle Ronnie]

thanks Bill. I tried every letter of the alphabet; no luck.

[osprey4]

Your boot disk may be missing the drivers to be able to run the CD-ROM drive. When you boot from the floppy, do you get an option to start with CD-ROM support?

[Uncle Ronnie]

osprey4: when I boot from the floppy, the message appears "Starting Windows 95", then I get an a:\ prompt

get the boot disk from www.bootdisk.com

use the win98 or winme one

[Uncle Ronnie]

GroundZero3: thanks for that lead; I have to figure out a way to get the boot disk file onto a 3.5" floppy because the Toshiba laptop I am working from now only has a CD-Rom and a Zip drive, which operate thru USB ports.

[elmers]

Well, and this is for the thinkpad, if it has a dumb cd rom (the kind built in) you need to get into the bios and set the pc to boot from cd. Then you put your win95 cd in and reboot. This is the easiest way, no downloading or diskettes. This is also the way Win95 is meant to be installed.