I hope this is an easy question for someone out there! I have an old Cannon laptop that has a corrupt Windows 95 file so it won't boot up. It also doesn't recognize its CD drive, so I can't get the computer to boot from the D drive. I don't know how to get to the BIOS on this old guy to try to get it to see its CD drive. I can get to a DOS prompt, but my DOS memory is getting pretty dim. Any suggestions?

Make a bootable floppy disk and try to boot from the floppy. Then you can install your operating system hopefully. Your CD drive will show up as letter D: or something similar.
As far as the Bios is concerned, try ALT+F1, delete, F2, F12 to get in. Some old CD-Roms were not bootable.
You can download boot disks here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/

Windows 95 needed a CD-Rom driver to be able to see the drive.
This is included in the boot disk.
You otherwise would have to load it on your disk under autoexec.bat.

as said above just head on over to bootdisk.com and get the 98 SE disk and it will give an option start computer with CD-Rom(or to just install windows for that matter) support and will load that OAK tech driver that runs on 99% of drives. I suggest the 98 disk as it is better

For future reference you can copy all the d:\win95 files to the c: in a folder @ c:\win95

that way the setup can run from the hard drive

how to do this?

Boot off the FDD
select start computer with CD-Rom suppot
d: - If you have more than one partition or drive this will be e,f ect
cd win95
format c: /q /s - ONLY IF U ARE STARTING FROM SCRACH..Do NOT do this if you have files to recover, just go to the next step
c:
md win95
d: - You should still be in the d:\win95 folder
copy *.* c:\win95
c:
cd win95
setup

follow instructions to reinstall