Windows 95 reinstall problems....

Hi again.

I know you guys are probably thinking what is up with the chick and the dinosaur computers and software. I am the only person with geek-like tendencies that my group of friends knows so everyone comes to me with their problems. Thanks to you all, I have been able to help a lot of computer challenged people.

So here is the problem of the day. A disabled friend of mine has this old computer running win 95.He uses it for AIM and email just to stay in touch with his friends so it doesn't have to be anything great. Some how he corrupted the OS and was not able to get windows to load. So, I went over to his place with my Win95 boot disk and a copy of Windows 98 on cd thinking I would just format his drive and put Windows 98 on it. WELL. I got the drive formatted no problem. I popped the windows 98 cd in to the drive and did the whole setup.exe thing and the cd won't read the disk. Hum. I concluded that my windows 95 boot disk probably did not have cd rom support.

So I have two ways to overcome this. Try to find a Win95 boot disk WITH cd rom support.
OR find a copy of Windows 95 ON DISK. I looked all over the net for a windows 95 boot disk with cd rom support and I could not find one. I tried my Windows 98 boot disk but it doesn't work. After the initial boot up, I just got a flashing curser. But, believe it or not, I got a Windows 95 upgrade on disk from another friend. So I go to install from this upgrade and of course after loading the first two disks a screen comes up saying that this is an upgrade version and setup can not find a previous version. It says to put the first installation disk from the original software in so that setup can verify that it is a legitimate upgrade. Well, IF I had the original disks, I would have used them to reinstall the OS.
So I am stuck again. I am wondering is anyone has any ideas for a workaround for the upgrade version or how to enable cd rom support so that I can just put 98 on it.

Thanks in advance,
Kittie

 

hey there kittiemeow....well you could try to reformat the HD and then reuse the a 98 start up disk to load win 98 if you dont have one you can get one from here http://www.bootdisk.com/ it has everything you need there to get a boot disk ...im not an expert like the rest of the people on the forms here so that just one way about going thou it but you can wait for others to reply if you want to.....

 

Hi wicked,
Thanks...I tried that and for some reason it won't boot from the win98 boot disk. It will from the 95 disk tho. I thought you could use a 98 boot disk on a 95 machine but for some reason it doesn't work on this one. After inital boot up, I get a flashing curser and you can not type anything.

 

Hi,
It will not finish loading from the win 98 boot disk. It WILL finish loading from the win95 boot disk. My cd will not work. I believe that it is due to a lack of CD rom support on the win 95 boot disk.

I DO have a full version of 98. It is on CD. I can't install it unless I can get the cd working.
I have an upgrade version of Windows 95 on diskette. But because I do not have the original version of windows 95 already on the computer, I can not complete the install. What I believe the solution possibilities are:

1. Find a full copy of windows 95 on disk.
2. Find a windows 95 boot disk that has cd rom support.
3. Get a copy of the First disk of a windows 95 disk install (that is all that I have to have to enable the upgrade software to proceed with the install.

There are no system restore disks. My friend got this PC second hand.

That's pretty much all the possibilities I can come up with but I am hoping that one of the super intelligent beings that hangs around here will have another idea.

Thanks for all the help.

 

What chaslang said in item 2 above - the first mention in this thread about BIOS setting to read CD drive FIRST

edit - I did this drill recently the hard way - my memory (the one in my head) is a little short.
Your boot floppy needs a generic CDrom driver and "mscdex.exe" added to config.sys and autoexec.bat files
Tons of info here
good luck

 

Okay. I got another boot disk from your link. The cd rom drivers installed but would you believe I still cannot get it to work.

Here's another approach. I have Windows 95 installed on a laptop I have. Is there anyway to copy the OS only onto disk and put it on the other system?

ARRRGGHH!

 

Making progress!!!!

I found some old dos 6.0 and windows back up disks. I tried different disks until windows setup found something acceptable to let the upgrade proceed! YAY!

Thanks for all your help. Hopefully the rest of the install will go smoothly.

 

Hi Kittie if you have formatted the drive, why dont you just change the Bios to boot from CD-Rom

EDIT: ok guess you sorted it

 

Cause the CD I have isn't bootable.

Edit: PS: Can I hang out in your smoke filled room

 

Hi kittie
Sure you can hang out in my smoke filled room

Sorry i was being lazy earlier and skipped a lot of the thread, didnt realize you had an old 98 disc, never mind looks like you sorted it now