Here is my impossible situation: I have reformatted my laptop, and am trying to reinstall the OS (win95) on it, but in order to even get it to boot, I have to use a boot disk. I have tried transferring all the files from the boot disk to the HD so that it would boot without it, so that I could put in the CDrom in order to reinstall, but cant get it to work! I can only put one drive or the other in, without the disk drive, I have no boot disk and therefore no boot, but without the CD I have no installation disk. How can I set my computer back up, so that it will boot to C and I can reinstall!?!? This is insanity. Any help would be INSANELY appreciated!!

I'm not sure if I understand your problem correctly, but if the paradox is that you can't access your cdrom (d:) to install your OS after a format from the boot disk, this is the reason: You can't use a boot disk to start the computer with cdrom support because it recognizes you have no cdrom (because the floppy's in there with the boot disk) and so aborts the install of the cdrom driver. Is that the problem? If so you need to copy the cdrom drivers directly to the hard drive from the boot disk. This can be accomplished through DOS commands. But the easiest way to do this is by using a boot disk specifically designed for the purpose. I know that Gateway's website offers one, a cdrom DOS boot disk, it's a zip to create a floppy that will copy the generic DOS cdrom drivers to your hard drive when you type "cdrom" from the a: prompt. Now this very well might work even on a non-gateway laptop. Search for it under the solo 2300. If your system won't boot at all to a c: prompt then the format/fdisk wasn't successful. You should definitely be able to get to a c: prompt after a proper format and fdisk. But if the problem is that you can't get to a d: prompt to use your cdrom, you need to do what I said above.

boot with floppy and type sys a: c: then copy files from a: to c: with command copy a:\*.* c:\ then put cdrom drive in and bootup... you could try and get yourself a copy of a bootable cdrom like win98 to start the process easier.

CDROM Drivers on Laptop with swappable CDROM / Floppy 1. Make the hard drive bootable by using FORMAT C: /S or SYS C: 2. Copy these four files to the C: drive a. mscdex.exe b. cdrom.sys ( which is your own specific cdrom driver ) c. autoexec.bat d. config.sys 3. AUTOEXEC.BAT needs only this line C:\MSCDEX.exe /D:MSCD001 4. CONFIG.SYS needs only this line DEVICE=C:\CDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001 5. Mscdex.exe is on the Win 95 boot disk 6. Autoexec.bat and Config.sys can be edited using Notepad 7. Change the config.sys to show your own cdrom driver. Drivers that might work are ATAPICD.SYS or VIDE-CDD.SYS You will need to download a driver if you don't have one handy 8. Once the files are on the hard drive, you can boot with the cdrom in place and the drivers will be accessed from the hard drive. Your cdrom will be D: drive