Retro geek question - Windows 95 install

rtuite

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I'm building a Win 95 machine out of an old P2 laptop (HP OmniBook 4150) for a showcase of how far we've come in 20 short years, but I'm (embarassingly) running into issues. The image I have puts the bootup floppy into a RAMdisk from the CD, as opposed to using an actual boot floppy (The laptop doesn't have an internal floppy drive). I got my partition all set up and formatted, took me a while to remember it all. And when I run "setup" off the disk, it goes through the chkdisk successfully, then gives me the following error:
Standard Mode: Fault in MS-DOS Extender
EC=2104 CS=0053 IP=2811 AX=0501 BX=0001 CX=0000 DX=0006
SI=4F45 DI=0000 BP=4278 DS=004B ES=02D4 SS=004B SP=4264
I have found some adjustments I need to make to config.sys on the image, but here's the issue I'm running into.

The img file has an img file of the boot floppy. As in, if you open the win95.img file in 7zip, you see a folder called [BOOT], wherein the Bootable_1.44m.img file is located that boots into the RAMdisk is stored. This img file is where the config.sys file that needs modified is located.

However, only 7Zip shows the [BOOT] folder, but won't let me modify it. I've tried other applications that can modify ISOs, like MagicISO, but it doesn't show the [BOOT] folder.

Any suggestions for how I can modify the image, or another workaround? I'd like to use it this weekend...
 
Solution

Press <F8> immediately after BIOS completed booting, you will be able to step line-by-line over CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
Try with WinImage.
You can also try going some other route: Download Win95/98 boot floppies. Make your hard drive bootable, with CD/ROM drives, and smartdrv enabled. Then, copy Win95 setup folder to the hard drive, and start setup from there. This way, it will remember installation folder, and will not ask you every time to put CD-ROM when you add / change features.
 

rtuite

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Well, no luck so far. The laptop doesn't have USB 2.0, so my floppy drive won't work. My next plan is to try to "burn" the disk image to the HDD via an adapter cable.
 
If you have a PC with bootable floppy: Take the laptop drive out, and connect is as the only drive in the other system. Boot from floppy (even DOS 6.22 will do), fdisk, format /s, copy Win95 setup folder, and reboot on the laptop.
You can do all this with laptop drive as second (e.g. in USB caddy), but FDISK won't be able to mark the partition bootable
 

Tcinator

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so im not sure if it will edit the 95 .img but if you need to modify anything, you can use dism to do it. if you have a windows 7 machine to play with the image on, let me know and i can walk you through the mounting of the .img so you can have full read write access on the .img file
 

rtuite

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Well, the system is old enough that it only has USB 1.1. It doesn't seem to be able to see a floppy drive, and I wonder if it is able to run my USB floppy drive without a full OS.

I believe DISM is only for Win7 and up...Any functions it performs wouldn't be related to such an old OS.

I may have found a solution, but it's an ugly one. Basically, I have to rebuild the entire image every time I make an adjustment. I basically re-created the boot floppy IMG file. Then, re-created the Win95 IMG file. Then, used the floppy IMG file as a boot image for the Win95 IMG file. I am still getting the "Standard Mode: Fault in MS-DOS Extender" error, but I just need to figure out what part of the config.sys file my system doesn't like and go from there.
 

Press <F8> immediately after BIOS completed booting, you will be able to step line-by-line over CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
 
Solution