Try partitioning and formatting the card on a modern PC and get DOS booting on it. Just the system files so you can boot, you don't need a full installation.

Then copy the Win95 installation files to a directory on the CF card. You can boot off the CF into DOS and then launch the Win95 installer. That's how I installed Win98, and it made things so much easier as I was testing odd combinations of hardware and drivers and needed to do multiple reinstalls. That lets me easily mount the drive on a modern PC, delete the directories Windows creates (C:\Windows, Documents and Settings, etc), and run the installer again.

Thanks, this computer just does not want to play with CF drives it seems (keeps trying to make 504mb partitions, the laptop easily works with DOS 7.x at larger partitions, but I keep getting Disk I/O errors when placed in the desktop. I'll just keep the 2GB drive with MSDOS. Maybe i'll look at getting a physical HD in the future for Win95.

It could be that the CF cards themselves have partially broken LBA support.

Ya, it's likely a limitation of that BIOS, you aren't able to partition and format the card in the laptop with Win95 media?

I haven't done it, but don't some people use a network card with an XT IDE bios chip to override limited HDD support on old BIOSes?

But functionally Win95 will run on a P75, but you won't be doing heavy gaming. You could mess around with Win3.1 and the later extensions MS released for it to be a taste of that early Windows gaming when it started being more advanced than Solitare and Mine Sweeper.

The best thing about using CF/SD on a retro PC is you can easily swap cards and try out different things while keeping a card with a working config to fall back to when you just feel like playing something rather than tinkering.

You're right, P75 wouldn't make Win95 run great, and at this point, I'm happy with 2gb on Win3.11 and Dos6.22. It's been years since I played in the early 95 era, I can't think of many games where I NEED it, especially at P75.

Thanks All

Old hard drives making weird clicking sounds do not necessarily have to be bad. I have a couple of IBM hard drives which have many jumper settings. I couldn't get them to work at first despite trying options printed on the hard drives. Using wrong jumper settings seemed to have damaged partitions. I was ready to throw them out but eventually found jumper settings that would at least print text in local language on boot. That looked suspicious so I booted from free DOS and formatted them. They all worked fine afterwards.

FWIW, I opened the drive and connected it to the computer. The read head kept bouncing in and out. I turned it off and tried to manually move the head and it was squeaking.

Slight update, purchased a Promise Ultra66 and the computer recognizes the larger CF/SD card. Was able to format and install Win95 on a 32GB SD card. I'll just install that or the CF depending on the mood of the day.

I did get a warning that I used a 40-wire IDE cable and not an 80-wire, so I can't run at 66, so I purchased an 80-wire cable. What's weird is that 32 GB drive boots to Win95 fine with that warning, the 2gb CF won't boot unless it's plugged directly into the onboard IDE connector (again, not a big deal since I can just put the CF for MSDOS or SD for Win95