You shouldn't have to do this, but the only thing I can think of is to try a different ATAPI cdrom driver than oakcdrom. Such as xcdrom from FreeDOS

Is it an original media print or a burned CD-R/W? The latter might not read on older drives... but then you say it read fine from within Windows Me on the same machine? ... Hmmm... but I've never seen OAKCDROM fail this way on an IDE ATAPI drive...

Burned.

Tried 3 disc drives now. What are you supposed to do when you can’t run the setup or copy from the CD? I guess I need to get actual Windows 95 install floppies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What you see, if you use: E:\dir ?

JustRob wrote on 2025-02-02, 14:09:

Burned.

Tried 3 disc drives now. What are you supposed to do when you can’t run the setup or copy from the CD? I guess I need to get actual Windows 95 install floppies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

try burning at a lower speed if you havent already make sure your not doing anything else on the computer at the same time (close all browsers/programs) if the buffer runs low you may get write errors, also could be the drive your burning with thats the issue, select the lowest speed your drive can do in imgburn dont burn at maximum as old drives wont like it, you may have some luck, also try a boot iso instead of floppy make sure its one that includes ramdrive, if that doenst work try installing with a different computer, for a couple of my old laptops i put the hdd in another computer to install win98 also i copy all drivers needed to a folder then swap the hdd back and let it detect all devices then install my drivers.

I’ll try installing Windows 95 on the HDD in my main rig and then swap it over. Hopefully that works.

Why can’t stuff ever just work

JustRob, I feel your pain. I've been having a lot of issues with a Win98SE tower at my mother's house, including Windows not booting properly if I use any EMS manager other than UMBPCI. The latest issue is it crashing while installing the necessary drivers while installing Windows. I really want Win98SE, as there are some things I want to do on it. And I like the GUI's color selections: Since then, Windows was losing on that aspect of the GUI: even WinXP, even though it had a more elaborate GUI, only had three color choices for certain window colors. 🙁

Yeah it’s rough.

Swapped my HDD over to my main PC, same error. At this point, it’s the disc. I have no idea how I used this disc to install Windows 95 in the past (I’m sure I have at least once), but it doesn’t work now.

Guess I’ll try burning a new one at the slowest speed possible

Well, it finally worked using a new CD. Crazy that I could read the old disk but not copy or run anything from it. Oh well

All been there, does make emulation almost appealing sometimes!

What I like doing is having a 2nd drive or partition with the Win95 folder on it (You don't need the whole CD just the WIn95 or Win98 folder to install windows) plus at least the most important drivers.
That way if you ever need to wipe c:\ for a clean install or whatever, the needed files are nice and safe on something more reliable than floppy/CD.

If you have networking setup (FTP, SMB, whatever) you can then copy the rest over the network and hardly need the CD drive.

glad you got it sorted in the end, what i usually do is after install before installing drivers, i copy all files from the hdd to a folder for backup making sure to copy hidden files/folders, then if anything messes up i just delete everything then copy all files back across, saves having to sit through another install, if im setting up a new computer ill setup the drive with FDISK then just use my backup files, not had any problems doing that so far.