Alright, I am a newb to Windows 3.1 so please don't flame me...

I bought an older labtop (Contura Aero 4/33c) w/ Windows 3.1. I want to switch to windows 95, but it did not have a CD drive (or floppy) so I bought a CD drive for my PCMCIA slot. It will power up and take disks and load. However, I have no idea how to get to it through any of my menus sinces I'm not farmiliar with this version of windows.

I tried running the card wizard to see if it will recognize it, but every time I try to bring up the card information, it tells me I have too many windows open. I closed every other window except the card wizard and still get the same error. Am I doing something incorrectly?

Alright, I actually played around with things and was able to get past this portion in windows 3.1.

Next, after I went through the wizard, I was told to go back to DOS and format the drive. When I try to format in DOS, I get this error:

format not supported in drive D.
format terminated.

Anyone have any idea what I should do?

"I want to install W95"

YES this is the W3.x forum and the W9x Forum is further up the page!!

You only need a MS-DOS boot disk with CD Drive Support to install W95:

http://www.bootdisk.com

As you have a PCMCIA CD Drive you also need the correct driver, try the following ARCCD.SYS found on this page:

http://83.67.55.228/page2.htm

IF the CD Drive is recognised with the ARCCD.SYS driver then you can fdisk/format the whole drive to start with a clean install:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;255867

.....then when you have W95 problems you can post in the W9x Forum.

The boot disk will need to initialize the external cd-rom. If the external works in DOS, then it can be made to work off the boot disk.

The format error message is because you can't format a cd-rom disk..."format not supported in drive D.
format terminated."

More info needed here; does the cd-rom work in DOS? It should if it works in windows. Or does it not read a cd in windows?

Skip

now my computer starts (the light goes on) the cd drive when booting from c:

i added a line in config:

device=arccd.sys
and it says the following:

PCCARD CDROM Driver 2.27 - ......
PCCARD CDROM unit Installed: IRQ 10

but I still cant access the cd rom drive..?
I tried to write device=arccd.sys /d:tscd001
but it makes no difference if the /d is there...

After banging after on a portege 3110, i finally managed to work the pcmcia cdrom.

In config.sys you must have this line
device=arccd.sys
The /D switch does not seem to do anything for this driver. /D:MSCD0001 or /D:ARCCD01 does not seem necessary. Also, it helps to REM out all other unecessary CDROM drivers to possible avoid IRQ conflicts.

In autoexec.bat you must have this line
LH MSCDEX /D:ARCCD01 /L:E > NUL
word for word. I've tried /D:banana or /D:anything and none of it works. Only /D:ARCCD01 seems to work, together with /L:E where E is a your SPECIFIED letter for your cdrom. Trying to use a variable such as %CDROM% doesn't work properly for some reason.

I can read stuff off the cdrom now so hopefully this helps. Lost enough hair already.