Thinkpads Forum

Since I can't find any working pcmcia driver for win 3.1, finally I decided to format the hard disk and install Windows 95 on the 701. I have got 14 floppy images for a pre-licensed win 95 copy. I created a virtual machine using 701's disk, and installed win 95 on it. Everything seemed to be okay and win 95 ran well in the VM. Then I return the hard disk to the 701. I started the machine, but instead of the loading screen of win 95, I got a message saying "Invalid system disk, replace **blablabla**". Thinking there might be problems with the installation, I removed the hard disk and went back to the VM. But the VM still ran well. Quite a strange thing...

To try again with a different method, I formated the disk again. Then I extracted all the floppy images, i.e. the bootable install disk and disk 1 to 13, to the disk, and reinstalled the disk into the 701. This time it asked me to insert a bootable floppy. It seemed that the 701 ignored the bootable content on the disk. I took out the disk, connected it to another VM running MS-DOS 5.0 and ran the SYS command. Then I placed the disk into the 701 and started the machine again. Again "Invalid system disk...". Then I was confused.

The disk seems to be in working condition since it works well in the VM and during the "MS-DOS+Win3.1" days. My 701C, with 75Mhz 486DX4 and 40MB RAM, also meets the system requirements of win 95 well. I just cannot figure out why the 701c refuses win 95. Help!

Simply extracting the contents of a bootable disk to a hard drive does not make it bootable.

Just do whatever you did originally to get MS-DOS on the 701, connect the hard drive to another computer, make a directory to hold Win95 installation files, extract all Win95 floppies to that directory, put the hard drive back and run setup from DOS.

Well actually I have done what you said before starting this topic but without luck. The setup.exe is not in the install disk. Your post reminded me to check the disk 1, where I found the setup.exe finally. It seemed that I should have ignored the install disk, which is used for booting. I tried again and succeeded. Thanks

Why not do it the way it's supposed to go? Leave the hdd in the laptop, then install W95 using the external floppy disc drive.

Spiny Norman wrote:Why not do it the way it's supposed to go? Leave the hdd in the laptop, then install W95 using the external floppy disc drive.

That would be difficult without having a floppy drive.