W95 reinstall and no CDROM

I've gotten myself in trouble trying to help a friend. This is a laptop Gateway2000 solo p130 with 32mb and 1gb hd. Hold system completed hosed w95 system.

Reformatted the hard drive in preparation of reloading w95. I did create a startup disk, however, cannot have a floppy and cdrom at the same time. When I attempt to boot with an autoexec and config.sys at have cdrom support (mscdex), it can't find a cdrom. Copy the files to the hard disk and replacing the floppy with the cdrom still errors not finding a cdrom.

At this point I'm stuck. It's been too many years since I fooled with real mode drives (windows 3.1) and I've forgotten how to get cdrom support. Any help would be appreciated.