installing windows 95 on a old compaq laptop

[thenewnoise]

when i install windows 95 on this old compaq presario it copies the files off the cd fine and then when it installs windows 95 and reboots for the first time it loses the cd-rom driver so it cant finish setting up windows. i looked on compaq.com and they dont have a cd-rom driver for this laptop is there anyone who knows a way to fix it?

thanks

 

[Doh!]

copy the cd contents to the hard drive and install from dos with the startup disk.

 

[thenewnoise]

but what about getting a driver for the cd rom so that the cd rom is useable?

 

[thenewnoise]

stupid question but how do i copy the whole cd at once with the copy command?

 

[jschuk]

Use xcopy or xcopy32 with the appropriate flags and make you have also loaded himem.sys and are using smartdrv.exe.

 

[thenewnoise]

whats smartdrv.exe and how do you load himem.sys?

 

[jschuk]

Smartdrv is a program to speed up data transfers (at least that is what it does). Himem.sys is your memory manager. Just get a 98 boot disk and copy smartdrv.exe and xcopy or xcopy32 from a 98 machine onto that disk as well. After the unit has booted up, type in smartdrv to load smartdrv.exe.

 

[ThaGrandCow]

<< stupid question but how do i copy the whole cd at once with the copy command? >>

You don't need the whole CD. Just boot with the startup disk, and make a dir called win95cabs or something. You only need the contents of 1 directory on the windows 95 CD: the \win9x directory. You don't need to use xcopy, just regular copy because there are no subfolders. Type: copy D:\win9x\*.* c:\win95cabs\
Then go into that directory and hit setup. win95 was weird like that, it wouldn't install the CDROM driver until after most everything else was installed so you were hosed if you needed to install from the CD.

EDIT: It's late, so I might not be making perfect sense. PM me if you have any problems, I'll walk you through everything.

 

[ThaGrandCow]

<< whats smartdrv.exe and how do you load himem.sys? >>

Don't worry about them, if you get Windows installed correctly it will take care of that for you.

 

[thenewnoise]

ok well this didnt really fix the problem, it did intstall win95 now but 95 still doesnt see the cd rom drive once windows is installed. how do i get windows to see the cd rom drive, compaq has no drivers on their site for this