Istalling Win95 on a formatted old computer

[thehalfman]

Greetings,

I'm trying to get my family's old computer up and running for my dad. So I went to the old computer and totally formatted it. Like, pretty much all I did was type "format" in the main hard drive and the partitioned hard drives we had on the computer.

Now I recently got ahold of a Win95 3.5 diskette and cd. I'm a little stumped at how to intall this thing. I get a dos menu asking me to intall drivers for my cd-rom, but then it just goes back to a: after and I don't know how to get this computer to read the cd-rom drive.

This computer I'm trying to install this on is pretty old--200Mhz Pentium. We got it in '95.

Any suggestions on how to get Win95 installed on this computer? Thanks

[mike breck]

Hi thehalfman,

Win95 Startup (bootdisk)disks do not have CD-Rom support. The answer is to use a Win98 Bootdisk which has CD-Rom support.
You can get one here

www.bootdisk.com

Boot up with the Bootdisk and Win95 CD-rom in CD drive. Keep an eye on what letter it makes your CD-Rom drive. Change to the CD-Rom drive letter and then type Setup and press Enter.

Many old-hands like to install Windows 95/98 from the HD. This means you copy the Win95 folder to the HD and run Setup from there. The advantage of this is you will never need to insert the Win95 CD to copy files. When asked for your CD, you just point Windows to the Win95 folder on your HD.
The disadvantage is that it uses about 50MB of HD space. So it depends on how large the HD is.

To do this:

Partition and Format the HD
Boot up with a Win98 bootdisk and choose CD-Rom support
Keep an eye on what drive letter is assigned to your CD-Rom drive - it will usually be one letter up from what it usually is
Put the Windows CD in the CD-Rom drive
(Ignore the quotation marks when typing these commands)
Change to your C: drive by typing C: at the A:\> prompt
Create a new directory on C: called Win95
Do this by typing "MD Win98" at the C:\> prompt
Copy the contents of the Win95 folder from the CD to the HD by typing "copy X:\Win95*.* C:\Win95"
Where "X" is the letter of your CD-Rom drive
When the files are copied, you can remove the CD and start setup by typing "C:\Win95\setup.exe" and press "Enter"
It will then run the installation from the HD

HTH

[reboot]

It's also totally possible that the CD-ROM in there is slaved off the sound card, and not a standard IDE device, in which case you need to try and find DOS drivers for the sound card, with CD-ROM support, and install them to DOS first.
It would be easier to temporarily install a standard IDE hard drive, use a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com with CD-ROM support, and install that way. Once Windows is installed, you can then dig up Windows drivers for the sound card/CD-ROM, which are much easier to find than the old DOS ones.

[thehalfman]

Thanks guys, I'll try this.

But why would they include a cd with Win95 if the disk didn't support it? Just seems strange.

[thehalfman]

Ok, here's what happened...

The Win98 bootdisk didn't seem to work so I went through the Win95 one and selected the cd-rom. Then the program made the cd-rom drice c:. So I went into C: and typed "setup" and it started working!

But then this message came up:

"Cannot create a remporary directoy. 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."

What does that mean? And what is HPFS and NTFS?

[Arbzask]

they assume you will use your own CD Rom drivers i suppose. a CD ROM drive would have been seen as a luxury then, hence the all floppy version, and all top kit has its own drivers

[reboot]

What that means is that the hard drive is not partitioned or formatted to accept the install.
The hard drive must be drive C, so if the startup disk made your CD-ROM drive C, the install can't write files to a CD, the system doesn't recognize any hard drive, and you get this (useless) error message.
You must Fdisk, create a primary partition, and make it active, then format it, before you can install Win95.

[thehalfman]

Thanks reboot

Could someone give me some direction on how to do all this? Not sure how to partition and all that.

[mike breck]

This link will guide you thro it

http://www.muisejt.com/fdisk/fdisk.html

However, I've just noticed a glaring omission on this otherwise helpful page. After you partition the HD and reboot to Format the partitions, you must type FORMAT C: /s

This will transfer the system files to the C: partition to make it bootable. The C: partition must be bootable before you can load Win95 onto it.

You only add the "/s" switch for the C: partition. If you have other partitions, then you just type FORMAT D:, FORMAT E: etc.

HTH

[thehalfman]

Thanks guys! Got it working!
That "glaring omission" was pretty glaring!

Now I just need to find that product key for my Win98SE upgrade...

[reboot]

Actually, a "format c:" would work, no need to sys the drive with the /s switch. The Win95 setup will do that.

[mike breck]

Glad you're up and running thehalfman.

Hmmm...that's interesting Reboot. I've always tended to do it "by the numbers" with Win95/98, so have never tried installing without using the /s switch during formatting.

[reboot]

The /s can get you in trouble. If you're going to partition a drive, and install Win2k, but only have a Win98 startup disk, you (can) end up with a boot menu that has "Previous version of DOS" as one of it's entries.
You can also get into the "Unrecognized version of DOS" error message, or the "Incompatible DOS version" error.
If you haven't seen these yet, you're lucky