Help on OS

[Airwalk2007]

Ok earlier today I pulled out an old pc from my basment and hooked it all up and I decided to format the HD but before that I made a boot disk I was running win 95 and made win95 disk and know I want to re-install it. I have the setup disk and the boot disk but I do not know what to do

thanks
ryan

[Force Flow]

Make sure that in the BIOS, the CDROM is set as a boot device. Then, start up the computer with the CD in the drive and follow the directions on the screen.

[Mesaeus]

I'm a little unclear on what your problem is. Did you format before you made a boot disk and you want to know how to make a boot disk with Windows ? Or did you make a boot disk and don't know how to proceed ?

[Airwalk2007]

I created the boot disk while i still had windows. How do I reach the BIOS?

[Airwalk2007]

I also dont know how to proceed

[Force Flow]

What kind of computer are you working with?

You're trying to re-install win95, right?

[Mesaeus]

That depends on the brand of the pc, what is it ? You can try pushing del, F1, F10, Escape, F2 while booting. Or press Pause to stop/start the boot process regularly and see if there's a message like "Press del to enter setup" or some other

[Airwalk2007]

Yes I am trying to install win95 its an very old dell

[Cricket]

This is sort of a cross post.

Cricket

[Airwalk2007]

Ok i found the bios but my only options for boot are hard disk only and disket drive

[Mesaeus]

Then put it on floppy (or diskette) and reboot with the setup floppy in. It should load DOS + a cdrom driver so you can access the cdrom drive. If that works okay, you should be able to start setup.exe on the cdrom

Edit : You DO have the cdrom, right ?

[edfair]

The 95 boot disk doesn't have the CD support that you will need. I would suggest that you download a 98se boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and boot with it ,chosing CD support, then change to the CD (usually E:, since the boot disk creates a ramdrive at the next available space) and run setup.
That should be sufficient to load the OS. The unanswered question, unasked also, is whether you have formatted the drive. You would do that with the 95 boot disk before using the 98 disk to reload the 95.

[Airwalk2007]

Ok I have tried everything I can think of posible I even tried booting with the 98se boot disk and installing 98 and it was having problems then I went back to 95 with a 95 boot disk and it loaded the cd rom and everyhint was good intill It started setup and it displayed

If you have HPFS or NTFS installed on your hard drive, you will need to create an MS-DOS boot partition to set up windows.


I ereased all partions restarted and then made a new partion and it didnt do one thing
Please help me

[edfair]

Was the partition that you tried to use on the last 95 install one that you created with the 95 boot disk? Some 95 has a problem with 98 partitions.
As a side question, how did you get the 95 boot disk to access the CD?

[Mesaeus]

Airwalk2007, it sounds a bit like you made a FAT32 partition in the W98 version of fdisk and tried to use it with the original version of Windows 95. Is this correct ? Only the updated W95 versions like OSR2 support FAT32. I suggest you use the W98 boot disk again, start fdisk, but this time answer NO when it asks "Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)" and then delete and recreate your partition(s). If you answer Yes it will create FAT32 partitions which the original W95 can't use, if you answer NO you will have to use partitions of 2 Gigabyte or less, but you'll be able to use them in any Windows version including the one you have. How big is the hard disk ?

[Airwalk2007]

Efair - As an awnser to your side question I got it from the site you told me about above.

Thanks for the help I will have to try again. If I use either disk and delete all partions and then use the 95 disk and re do the partion? Is that what your trying to tell me?

[edfair]

That was what I was saying. If you used large drive support on the 98 you got FAT32 and early 95s can't see FAT32 partitions. But I was hinting at it, not really certain that you might have done it. I've seen too many other issues cause problems to make that assumption.

[kev7555]

Sorry to butt-in here, but why are you trying to reload Windows 95? It's no longer supported and there are lot of modern programs that won't run properly on Win 95 but will on Win 98SE.

Most old Win 95 machines will run Win 98 nicely.

I have several old machines ranging from 166 MHZ to 300 MHZ that run 98 real swell.



I tried booting an old machine from a 98 start-up disk and loading 95 but I could not get it to load. Couldn't find the right command. The 98 "setup" command did not work with 95



-Kev