I have an old laptop with a busted CD drive but it seems to boot to the HDD (I put an old Windows drive in the slot and it sees Windows there but crashes during boot). I don't have an option to boot ...

You need a boot disk. Find another Win95 machine. Make a startup disk. You then have to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat files on that disk to 1. identify the cd player driver in config.sys (a ...

Optical drives no longer come pre-installed in most PCs and laptops, yet they’re still indispensable for many users. Whether for playing old DVDs, installing ancient software from CDs, or burning data ...