On older PC’s (read, pre-Win95) all I had to do to boot from floppy was to put the system disk in the drive and turn on the power. How does one boot from floppy on a machine “Designed for Windows 95”?
Same thing.
Just make sure bios is set to boot from floppy before the hard drive.
How might one go about making the adjustment?
Either the machine will automatically try to boot from floppy on startup (in which case no adjustment is necessary)
Or,
When the machine starts you’ll see something like “Hit Del to Enter Setup” or “Press F1 to Enter Bios” or similar. Pressing ‘del’ or ‘F1’ in these examples will bang you into BIOS, where you can scroll through all the available machine options. One of them will be “Boot Order” or “Boot Devices”… in that setting, ensure that A: appears before C: in the boot order list.
Which key you have to press to enter BIOS on startup is machine dependent. It’ll be in the handbook if you have one, or if your monitor’s already warmed up, you should be able to see the message on the screen telling you which key to press before it starts booting from the hard drive.
On modern machines, you now get the option to boot from CDROM and USB devices, as well as network devices. But on a '95 machine, you’ll usually be limited to boot first from A:, then from C: (or vice versa).
I thought you meant the Oracle Database software.
I’d offer advice but it’s never appreciated. Besides Gary handled it.
The machine in question is a hand-me-down, and was purchased second-hand, prior to that. Only thing it says about BIOS, at startup, is the copyright notice.
Try hitting either
Del
F1
F2
F10
straight after you apply the power and the moment you see anything displayed on the screen. The trick is to get it before it begins the boot sequence off the hard drive.
Failing that, do a quick google for the machine type if you know what it is; that’ll likely find you a bunch of old bios updates (if there were any, and there usually were) as well the exact key for breaking into the bios routine. The 4 quoted above are the common ones I’ve had to use in the past.
One of the most frustrating times I’ve ever had fixing a computer was when I was younger and though that F2 was pretty much standard (which, of course, it isn’t). It was a compaq (if I recall) that had a copyright notice and no “enter bios” notice..it ended up being F11, and took me a half-hour of reboots to figure it out.