HELP .....installing win 95 from ms-dos

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win95.general.discussion (More info?)

>i am trying to install windows 95 on a laptop after the
>hard drive was formatted. I set up a primary partition
>using fdisk and now when I got to the first disk, it says:
>Please wait while Setup initializes

The sequence is wrong. You have to run FDisk BEFORE you format the
harddisk. Since you have run FDisk, you should not format the
harddisk, adding the switch /S so that the partition will be bootable.
That is,
format C: /S

If you are going to install Windows from a CD-ROM, you will also need
to tell DOS how to read a CD-ROM. Here is how to add your CD-ROM
driver to the boot disk. The boot disk might be drive C: or it might
be a Windows Startup Disk that you can insert into drive A:.

The CD-ROM driver will normally have a name with the letters CD in it
and it will have the extension .SYS. One way to get a CD-ROM driver is
to run the installation program that came with the CD-ROM. Also, you
can usually get a driver from the web site of the companmy that made
the CD-ROM. Or you can search your C: drive for *CD*.SYS.

Using Notepad or any word processor, make a text file, name it
CONFIG.SYS and add it to the boot disk. This file should look like
this, but with the name of your CD-ROM driver in place of
CDDRIVER.SYS:
DEVICE=CDDRIVER.SYS /D:MSCD000
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS

Add a copy of MSCDEX.EXE to the boot disk. You can get MSCDEX from the
folder C:\Windows/Command.

Using Notepad or any word processor, make a text file, name it
AUTOEXEC.BAT and add it to the bootdisk. It should look like this:
MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD000


Bill Starbuck (MVP)