Guys, please help me format my win95 machine

Here is what I want to do..

i just wana format the damn thing. i made a boot disc. ive set all my primary/secondary ide ****s to Auto in bios...when the boot disc loads. i type in d:\ and i get "Invalid Drive Specification"

ive tried everything. i even tried putting the damn primary ide to the CD ROM. Is it just saying that because its impossible to read D in dos? cuz after i do format c: .. im obviously going to have to install win95...and thats on a CD. so when i have my freshly new c: drive and i type in d:\setup.exe and get Invalid Drive Specification, ill be screwed wont i?

So please tell me the steps i need to take in order to make my CDROM recognizable in DOS. THANKS!

ps D is my CDROM drive letter.

I guess you're using a Win95 boot floppy? It doesn't load a driver for the CDROM. You'll need a Win98 bootdisk for that. Or a driver disk for your CDROM if you have it handy.
If you need a bootdisk, go to www.bootdisk.com .

Repo Man's right, you need a floppy drive that has CD-ROM drivers on it. Grab a Win98 or WinME boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and you'll be good to go

so i can fdisk and all that stuff with a win98 boot disk on a win95 machine?

Windows 95 Original
Windows 95 Version B
Windows 98 OEM
Windows 98 Custom, No Ramdrive
Windows 98 SE OEM
Windows 98 SE Custom, No Ramdrive
Windows Me OEM
Windows Me Custom, No Ramdrive


hmm which one?

I would go with 98, or 98 SE OEM. I don't know if the ME boot disk will allow you to format the drive with FAT 16, which is the file system used by 95, but I know the 98 boot disks will. There is a good chance that you could format in FAT 16 rather than FAT 32 with the ME, but since I'm not sure, to save time I'd go with the sure thing.

Well, Win95a used FAT. Win95b and Win95c used FAT32.

Oh, ok. I thought that FAT 32 had been introduced with 98.
Well, I guess it is still your choice Slogan.

How big of a HD are you installing to?

95a/b/c has a HD limit of 32Gb no matter how many partitions you have.

If you have an old box with the 8Gb bios limit, it won't be able to see any primary partition larger than that with out a HD bios spanning utility from the HD manufacturer that allows you to get around the 8Gb limit.