Ah the joys of relatives. :o)

One of my relatives has sent me a laptop to
"repair", which is giving me no end of frustration.

It is an IBM Thinkpad, that will boot up in safe
mode or command prompt mode, but will not go into
Win95. It just says "starting win 95" then gives
a command prompt. Obviously something in windows
has been corrupted?

Now if I boot up in ANY mode I can get working, I
try to run setup.exe on his Win95 disk to reinstall
windows, and it says; "Setup cannot be run from msdos
mode with a private configuration. Either run setup
from windows or shut down windows and run setup from
msdos".

Hmm, now I can't shut down windows as windows will not
run. And I AM running from msdos!! Even if I boot from
a known good boot floppy in msdos mode I get the same
message when trying to run the CD setup.

I have even booted with a sys floppy with command.com
io.sys etc from a different version of dos and get
the same message. Yes the CD drive does read ok, and
I have tried many config.sys and autoexec.bat setups.

What is REALLY annoying is that the Laptop is modular,
and I have to pull it apart to put the floppy drive in
and again to swap the floppy for the CD drive. No it
can't have both operating at once! :o(

Now the hard drive, CD, floppy, etc all work as normal
in dos mode. I'm quite prepared to delete windows
and just run the thing in dos mode so I can reinstall
Win95 from his CD. BUT the windows setup on the CD will
not run!

Does anyone have a clue what went wrong with the Laptop
or (maybe) how to fix it?
-Roman

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