When you boot into Win95, can you read CDs from within the OS? Do you have any spare CD drives you can swap in for testing purposes?

Seems to me like it's trying to boot from the CD at least.

Those old drives can be quite picky with the media, sometimes they won't accept CD-R:s at all. Try with a newer DVD- or CD-ROM drive if you have one.

You can create a Plop bootmanager boot disk (on floppy) and boot from CD from there .

Some of the early P1 boards didn't fully support booting from CD , plop will fix that , alternatively install plop onto the HDD , you will have the added advantage of being able to install multiple oses (ex Dos 6.11 + Windows 98

This is a good boot floppy; http://schierlm.users.sourceforge.net/bootdisk/ I use this one quite often. It even works for systems which don't even have the option to boot from CD-ROM, so such disks have other potential uses.

thanks guys I'll try those out. With floppies that have an iso file , can you just drag and drop the contents of the iso straight onto the floppy?

Also some of these iso's are larger than a floppy

i think ISO Files is for bootable CDs.

Most likely.

The one I linked provides a floppy image (In IMG format) and the tool to write it, that being RawWrite Win. You generally can't drag-and-drop the contents of a bootable floppy... There are circumstances where it might work, but you may as well avoid that hassle and just use RawWrite instead.

There are much older versions of RawWrite for DOS and Windows 95 out there somewhere if you're stuck on an older machine, I think they were easy enough to find via a search engine. I only know because I've only used a Win9X or DOS system to write floppy images within the past few years because my version of WinImage doesn't get along with Windows 7 very well.