Dos

[Jewels1968]

I hve finally got a hold of Win 95B floppies to install it on my old laptop. (it has only floppy drive) but when I go to install it tells me that setup has detected a compressed drive or something and I need to remove it or make an MS DOS boot partition. The hard drive on this baby is only 774MB. How do I get around this. And does anyone know where I can get ahold on a free DOS download, if there is such a thing??? Thanks in advance!!!!

Jewels

 

[TSSTechie]

Hi

Has the laptop got anything on you want to keep or any other operating system. If not, get a windows boot disk (or you could check to see if fdisk.exe is on the windows 95 disks you've got) and run fdisk from that. Delete all partitions and then create a primary DOS partition. You should then be able to install Windows.

Hope this helps

May The Force Be With You

 

[edfair]

try

http://www.bootdisk.com

You want to use the 95 version to fdisk and remove partition, then fdisk and create, then format /s and put himem.sys and a config.sys to call it on the bootable HD.
Should allow you to install it then.


Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[jrbarnett]

Jewels

To answer your questions in reverse order: For a free DOS take a look at

http://www.freedos.org/.

What do you want to do about the compressed partition? The Drivespace used by DOS 6.22/Win 95 must have a small uncompressed partition for the operating system to load the decompression drivers from. You could wipe that and erase the hard drive and start from scratch, but that would reduce your storage capacity. It will be very tight with 774Mb, but I did manage in one setup to get win95 original, IE5.02, Word/Excel 95, Ppt 95 viewer and year 2000 patches with about 250Mb free and it worked like a charm.

John

 

[wolluf]

Use fdisk to remove any existing partition(s) and create a new one. You can get a 95b boot floppy from

http://web.tampabay.rr.com/jokrow/downloads/boot95b.exe

(I've no idea if fdisk is on the win95 install floppy set - hence the boot floppy link).

DOS - do you need full operating system (or is something like the 95 boot floppy sufficient)?

http://www.freedos.org/

might be useful.

 

[TopHat2]

You can download a Win95b boot disk (and other versions) from:

http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html

Run the file you download it will create a bootable floppy, this disk will have FDISK, FORMAT, and a lot of other usefull stuff on it.

Assuming that you want to completely wipe your HDD, loosing any files that are on it, run FDISK. In FDISK start by deleting any Logical DOS Drive(s), then Extended DOS partition(s), then the Primary DOS partition. Now recreate the Primary DOS partition. Next format the HDD with the command FORMAT C:/s.

774MB is pleanty to install Windows95, if you want you can create a new compressed drive after Windows is installed.