New computer NO operating system

[sp8toy]

I just bought a new PC but I did not buy an operating system. (Tried to save some money since I have gotten an operating system 2 times in the last couple of years anyway.)

I have my Win 95 CD, (still looking for my win 98 CD). I thought it would run by choosing the option to boot from CD rom in the CMOS. However it does not. I found the driver for the CD rom on the net, made a system floppy to boot from and now formatted the hard drive.

First, is there anything or if I find my Win 98 CD, will it load automatically from the CD without using the floppy and the driver.

If not, I have little DOS memory, but I have changed the config.sys file on the boot-up disk to the specs for the CD-rom. But is there something else I have to do because the CD is still not being read. I thought I remembered doing something to the autoexec.bat file also in order to specify a drive for the CD or something. Any help would be appreciated. I hated giving microsoft money for updates that do little for my uses, but this has been a lot of trouble.

[MishY]

Try downloading the windows 95 bootdisk from the CyberTechHelp downloads section.

http://www.cybertechhelp.com/html/downloads/

or the cdrom God bootdisk which you can get here :

http://www.computers.pcc.edu/~troubleshoot/aplus/cdrom.htm

Boot from the floppy disk.

Then when you get to the prompt type :

D:\win95\ (if D is your cdrom)

then setup.exe

MishY

[sp8toy]

I was able to boot to my A: drive. Also able to find the correct driver for my CD rom so I can now read my CDrom on the E: drive. When I formatted the hard drive, I formatted for 1 large drive, but I do have a C drive and a D drive which is listed as a RAMdrive.

Here's the problem. I cannot load from my Win 95 cd. When I run the SETUP the program begins with a warning about the version of Scandisk will only work with MSDos version 5.0 and later. Setup found a compressed volume or a disk cache utility. Quit and check or remove your disk cache utility begin setup again. I can hit esc to continue. Then while installing it stops and gives the following error --

Setup error detection: Error SU-0013 Setup could not create files on your startup drive and cannot setup Windows.

Please help. First message got me half way there. I already had run Fdisk before and removed partitions, (but I got lazy and did not remove the last one so I don't know if I need to go back and do this.) Also I formatted my hard drive with a win 98 system disk from my work PC. Just trying to give as much info as possible so you will know what is going on. Thanks.

[slipshod]

What brand of hard drive is this?

[sp8toy]

Finally got it the other day. Thanks for the interest, but it turned out to be a problem with the version of ScanDisk. I finally decided to try loading the win 98 upgrade disk first. Believe it or not it didn't have to have win 95 loaded, you just had to be able to load the CD into the drive for it to validate it. Wow....I wouldn't have thought MSFT would have actually done that. Usually they kinda screw you into buying the newest FULL version of everything. I tried to save a dollar and for once I actually did.