I have an old compac notebook which has not been used in a couple years.
When I turned it on it says something about a hibernation file corrupted and says to insert boot disc. I downloaded a win95 boot disc and I get an :A\. Any ideas?

Welcome to PCHF maphil,

one of two things have happen,

1. Windows went coruupt.
2. Hard drive has crashed.

the easiest fix is to insert a windows boot disc. you said you are running windows 95?

I downloaded a bootdisc for each of the following Win95,win98,MS-DOS from bootdisc.com. Both of the win discs come up non system disc. The ms-dos disc gives me an A:\ prompt

did you make the boot disk on a floopy disk?

yes 3.5 floppy