Win95 Installation - Help

**jakdin** · 10-12-2005, 04:27 PM

I recently purchased Winblows95J on my trip to Japan.

My main reason for wanting to use this OS was the need for an older type machine that will hopefully play older DOS games. I've tried DosBox on my new machine, Win2K, to no avail and I want the experience of doing the OLD and REAL way.

I have a lower end PC at home that is not being used, so I booted with SystemCommander7, from a Floppy, and formatted the HD, then attempted to install the OS...

I got the DOS error message stating that I needed to put in a bootable disk and would I so kindly hit any key!

... I thought the CD containing Win95 would be able to boot up, since hey, it's what you install the frikkin OS with!!!

Then, after some half-assed research online (for 2hrs) I realized that maybe I have to do some serious prep-work in order to install this old beastly OS. Namely, have a autoexec.bat that has a driver for the CD-ROM on it...? Is this right?

I downloaded a Win95 Boot Disk, do I need to add the CD-ROM driver executable line to the file on this disk?

If anyone knows my pain, please help me!

**Shane R. Monroe** · 10-12-2005, 05:47 PM

I'm sure I have a proper boot disk image here complete with drivers ... Just ping me offline.

**jakdin** · 10-12-2005, 06:01 PM

Thanks, Shane. I'll give it a go.

**jakdin** · 10-13-2005, 03:30 PM

I think what I am going to do is just take the HD from the OLD PC and put it in my Win2k machine, install Win95 to that HD and then set up the machine so I can choose which HD to boot up when I turn the thing on.

**TripHamer** · 10-13-2005, 04:32 PM

Well if your going to go ripping hard drives out, you can also just copy the win95 files to the hard drive and reinstall it in the old machine and just install the OS that way.

Also try a win 98 boot disk, it has cd drivers built in that'll work.

**jakdin** · 10-13-2005, 09:13 PM

Originally Posted by TripHamer

Well if your going to go ripping hard drives out, you can also just copy the win95 files to the hard drive and reinstall it in the old machine and just install the OS that way.

Also try a win 98 boot disk, it has cd drivers built in that'll work.

Yeah. I just finished installing the HD, but it took me quite a while since I suddenly saw the motherboard FULL of dust...so a major cleaning rampage commenced.

Now let's find out if it will let me install Win95 on the thing...

**jakdin** · 10-13-2005, 09:36 PM

Originally Posted by TripHamer

Well if your going to go ripping hard drives out, you can also just copy the win95 files to the hard drive and reinstall it in the old machine and just install the OS that way.

Do you mean that I can copy the whole Win95 system to the HD manually from the CD-ROM? Then it would boot up ok?

I'm a bit confused... sorry.

**TripHamer** · 10-14-2005, 01:13 AM

Well yes you could just copy the cd onto the hard drive, but you'll still have to install it. And that would be a way of getting around the cd drive issue.

**jakdin** · 10-14-2005, 09:51 AM

Originally Posted by TripHamer

Well yes you could just copy the cd onto the hard drive, but you'll still have to install it. And that would be a way of getting around the cd drive issue.

I thought I was pretty good with computers til now!

I really need to sit down and study the underlying structure of the PC and how the OS interracts with the hardware, etc.

Well, last night, after installing the second HD to my Win2k machine, I got Win95 installed on the slave HD...but now when it starts up, it gets as far as the coloured Win95 intro screen and then it blinks off and i get an error. It says there was a "hard drive error IOS" ... so I'll be trying the install again tonight.

One thing that might be a problem is that I am installing from a DVD-RW drive?? Maybe I should use the 52X CD-ROM instead...?

**TripHamer** · 10-14-2005, 03:51 PM

I typed the last paragraph about scanning the hard drive first but I realized what you did:

You can't install an older operating system on a computer with a newer one on it already. (unless someone found a way). You have to first install the older ones because they will not see the newer ones if you install them last.

In other words 2000 will see 95 installed but not the other way around. Hopefully you didn't damage your 2000 install. If you did and win 2000 is installed on a FAT32 partition it may be as easy as giving the FDISK /MBR command to repair the damage. You may need to do the recovery process for a NTFS filesystem. So try pulling the slave drive out and get your 2000 up and running again.

Sorry that I didn't think of it eariler, I thought that you were just going to copy the win 95 cd to the old drive and then reinstall that drive into the computer (not the win 2k one) and install win 95 from the hard drive instead of the cd. (to get around the cd limitation)

It could also be that the hard drive has bad sectors? Try running scandisk and do a thorough surface test. It'll take awhile. On the sector map you should also notice that it checks sectors at a somewhat constant rate. If it takes a long time on some sectors (a bunch in one area) that may indicate problems with the hard drive. And usually those sectors will be surrounded by bad sectors. If it go all the way thru, at a somewhat constant rate, then it should be ok.