Installing Windows 95 with a USB boot drive

[Janterra]

Hey, i have an old ibm tower from 96' or 97' alomg with all of the recovery media. It posts and runs fine atm, just doesn't have a hdd. I was wondering if i would be able to install the os on a usb flash drive and use that as the main drive. Would there be any issues? btw it is intended to run win 95

 

[Natsukage]

Hello.

First of all, if your PC is incapable of booting from any USB flash drive, you will have issues. Can you test a bootable drive, from Ubuntu for example, to check if it actually can load from a flash drive? Make a live usb disk of ubuntu and test it on the computer.

As for how to make it:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1703888

This has all the instructions needed.

 

[Janterra]

Hello.

First of all, if your PC is incapable of booting from any USB flash drive, you will have issues. Can you test a bootable drive, from Ubuntu for example, to check if it actually can load from a flash drive? Make a live usb disk of ubuntu and test it on the computer.

As for how to make it:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1703888

This has all the instructions needed.

Yeah i tried to boot with a flash drive pluged in and i believe it recognised it was there, but when trying to change directories to the drive it wouldn't work. There is most likely a workaround, but i do not have the time or patience to mess around with all of the files on the recovery cd, especially with it only have 64MB of ram. Thank you for your response.

Ps. When i mentioned changing directories i meant within ms dos. I think that i was able to boot into it with the recovery media.

 

[TerryLaze]

running windows from usb especially old versions is a very bad idea, it's gonna have a ton of problems if you even get it to work.
Get puppy wary to run from the usb,it's quite small and doesn't need a lot of ram and thous will boot and run fast(as fast as possible on such old hardware) while still being useful and preconfigured with most software you will need.

 

[bignastyid]

The short answer here is no. There is now way your old hardware supports booting from usb.

 

[Natsukage]

Yeah i tried to boot with a flash drive pluged in and i believe it recognised it was there, but when trying to change directories to the drive it wouldn't work. There is most likely a workaround, but i do not have the time or patience to mess around with all of the files on the recovery cd, especially with it only have 64MB of ram. Thank you for your response.

Ps. When i mentioned changing directories i meant within ms dos. I think that i was able to boot into it with the recovery media.

Most old computers cannot boot directly from the USB. I highly suggest buying an old hard drive off ebay and using it as your boot drive. It will be way less of a hassle. Win95 has no USB support.