JonnyGators

I'm not sure if this will be seen as self promotion that is frowned on, or appreciated info - so feel free to remove this post if it's deemed not appropriate or on topic for this thread. This is related in the sense that using this Windows 95 patch and getting help in getting it to work - and having it work for an upgrade install from 3.1 has inspired me to start a series of youtube streaming related to this. I've realized that, now that I've managed to get my Pentium 4 to accept a Windows 3.1 install, and upgrade to 95, that I may have a machine that is capable of installing Windows 1, and upgrading it through various versions up to 10. I did find an over 10 hour video where something like this had been done, which tells me this is something that will require more than 1 live stream to do. But also, I do want to take some time with each version to install apps, play around, explore each version, and see what continues to work from version to version, so this will be a weekly series on Friday nights, 8pm EST. This will be streamed on my tech related youtube channel "The Computer Bar" - feel free to check it out and subscribe. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwzGycIpr-kaczZFM-ay7Gw

There were 2 major differences I identified here from my previous attempts....the use of setup /p i, and the use of your modified 98SE boot disk. I've been playing around with various methods of 95 installation at this point. I've been going back and forth with attempts at 3.1 and 95 installs on this drive, and managed to get 3.1 on there. So, for shits and giggles before wiping and getting back to serious testing on this, I decided to try upgrading to 95 from 3.1. The first attempt to run setup straight and use the fix on the reboot had the same outcome - crashing on the reboot after the fix was applied. But...going into safe mode, I was able to roll back to 3.1. Not that it mattered all that much, I could easily do another clean 3.1 install if I wanted to. So, I decided, before I wipe and try this recommended process as listed, lets try the ugrade again, this time with the /p i. Well....I'm at the point now where it's looking for plug and play, so I'm past the point of crashing. Woohoo! It seems that's the key for my situation, I needed the /p i. Perhaps a note to that effect should be added to the readme of the patch?

Motherboard is an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe. Processor is a Pentium 4 3.0GHz. The motherboard does have 98/95 drivers available, which suggests it's plausible it would support such an installation. The BIOS requires setting up a compatibility mode for IDE for 95/98, to either use Primary P-ATA and SATA, Secondary P-ATA and SATA, or only P-ATA. For the purposes of setting up Windows 95, I set it up for only P-ATA, with an IDE Module on the primary, and 2 optical drives on the secondary. (I do have this machine working as a dual-boot XP/98 machine when it's set for Secondary P-ATA and SATA. Installing 98 required some patching.) I had the machine maxed out at 4GB of RAM. But, for the purposes of trying to eliminate possible problems, I took those out and put in a stick of 256MB. All of my Windows 95 installation attempts have been clean installs. Following this process: For retail: Boot with DOS 6.22 Disk Use fdisk to create a partition (creates 2GB partition) Format partition Copy contents of win95 directory of retail disk to c:\windows\options\cabs (online guide recommends this method) run the setup go through the setup process. (since a windows directory already exists, it wants to install to windows.000. I know the folder isn't a problem, so I set it back to windows. So the patch should still be patching the correct path) Insert patch disk when it gets to the point of wanting to restart. Patch disk runs successfully, and restarts I get blue sky Windows 95 startup screen Screen goes black - splash screen for the motherboard comes back up - automatic restart after some sort of crash that displayed no info/error. Option to boot into safe mode comes up. For OEM2 - same process as above, except I used a windows 95 boot disk to run fdisk and format, creating a larger partition. For the sake of troubleshooting - I tried it again today with the retail CD, running the setup directly off of the CD, to see if that makes a difference. It made no difference. Let me know if you have any further questions or if there's any other info I can provide.

I've tried getting Windows 95 on my P4 frontwards, backwards, upsideown, insideout, and absolutely cannot get it to take. This fix isn't working on my machine. I'm pretty sure it's somehow related to the bugs this patch is supposed to patch, as it occurs right at the point where it restarts. What I have observed is if I don't use this tool, after the restart, I do get the screen where it's resuming the install process, but at that point it crashes out and restarts. From that point on, I can only do 2 things, start in safe mode and have it bark at me that it can't complete the installation from safe mode, or start normally and have it automatically restart again, no error, no hint, no clues. When I use your tool, after it applies, I don't even get the screen where it resumes the process. I get the windows startup, and then automatic restart. With the option for safe mode, or normal, with the same situation. Without any error codes or messages or anything I'm not sure how to even begin trying to determine where the problem lies. I hope you have an interest in improving this tool, since it's clearly not at 100 percent. Please let me know what info I can provide to help get this working for my computer.

Really annoying problem keeps cropping up in my 95 VMs though....the A: drive keeps breaking. I don't know what triggers it, but at first it works fine, if I have something to install that requires multiple floppy images, such as plus, I can attach the first image to the A: drive, run the setup, and change disks as prompted and resume the setup, and it detects the new disk just fine. But then at some point, something triggers this to break on the VM, and it will not detect the disk change. Changing the disk breaks the drive until powering the VM off and back on. Which is a problem when it comes to installers that require multiple disks. I've only been able to fix it by completely redoing the VM, but I'm on my 3rd VM, and I've still not figured out what triggers it to avoid it. Anyone run into that before?

Ok, will see what I can round up for a video card. I don't have anything of that era handy, the only spares I have are PCI-E, but I can probably round something up somewhere eventually. Meanwhile, testing in virtual, I've found the repair seems to not work for OSR1. It appears to be doing an OSR2 repair and getting the MS-DOS error. I should note, I'm not entirely confident that my ISOs are properly labeled. My retail and OSR1 both make me enter dashes and OEM when entering in the key though, so that seems right. But, my retail copy comes with a version of Internet Explorer (of the era of the floating windows icon in the sky, before the big blue e), and from what I read on wikipedia, retail didn't come with any version of internet explorer. So....not sure about that. But, anyways, my iso that is labeled retail does the fix correctly, my iso that is labeled OSR1 doesn't. Obviously, no rush to look into that, as I'm happy playing around with my "retail" iso for my purposes, but figured you would want to know that.

The video card is an ati radeon 9200 series all in wonder pro. It's an AGP card. From what I've read, earlier 95 versions don't support AGP, but treat it like PCI, which suggests to me it could work. But, in my testing even OEM2.5 gives me the same problem, so I don't think it has to do with AGP. But, looking at the amd site for drivers, I can only go as far back as 98 for a driver for the card. So I could be out of luck with the video card. For troubleshooting purposes, I obtained a retail 95 CD, and have tested the install process there. The fix doesn't give the dos version error. But, I still get the restart issue, so I'm still stuck. Videocard, and processor, seem to be the best culprits at this point. This is something of a nostalgia machine....I wanted something to put my turtle beach santa cruz sound card and all in wonder agp video card in, since I've not been able to bring myself to toss them all these years, and figured.....I should use them, or get rid of them. I chose the only option, obviously. So I picked up the same mobo and processor as my first build, and figured, may as well have a bit of fun and do more than just an XP build, and did the 98SE dual boot to have something I can do some old school gaming on. But, with some IDE drives kicking around, I figured....may as well have a little windows 95 fun as well. My first PC purchase was a 95 machine, and I remember it having IE with an animated blue sky instead of a blue E, which makes that IE 1 or 2. I figure, the guy that built it would have probably had access to OEM 1. It also came with plus installed on it. So....could have been retail, could have been oem 1, if I get one of those to work I'll be happy. I remember in college I used to use netscape on it, and one day I noticed, well, some people have the big blue rotating E....maybe I should install that. And my roommate told me I'd regret it. And sure enough.....I regretted doing the IE update for the rest of the life of that computer, completely possessed the machine as I put it at the time. And he laughed, and laughed. And I tried to uninstall it. And he laughed more. It's a funny story that I think anyone I try to tell it to fail to really understand.....so I figure, maybe I should try to demonstrate it. But I guess if my hardware just can't do 95, I can always try to re-create that experience in a virtual environment instead. Or buy an older box. Anyways, thanks for the tips, and I'm up for more troubleshooting/experimenting if you think you can get this to work. But if not, it's cool.

One other thing, the repair consistently displays the "incorrect ms-dos version" line, whether it gets stuck before 95 fails to start, or it finishes after 95 fails to start. Not sure what that's all about. But this repair seems to be overlooking something or incomplete at this time, hopefully we can get something more complete at the end of this.

For troubleshooting purposes, tried OEM 2.5 version. Same results. No matter what, a reboot with no error when trying to start up after the first reboot in the setup process, fix or no fix. This motherboard has 95 drivers, so that would imply it can do Windows 95 somehow...

Ok, not sure if this helps, but....from experimenting tonight, I'm finding the patch doesn't exactly work completely correct when I try it. I thought at some point last night I got the patch to apply without getting stuck on first attempt, but perhaps not. Tonight, here is what consistently happens. I do the first part of the install, no problem. On reboot, insert diskette with your fix. Diskette boots, runs through the process, then at some point after applying something to the registry, it gives an error about wrong ms-dos version, and tells me to wait, something about it may take a few minutes. But, it never advances at this point. Forcing a restart, the install proceeds, but fails, triggers a restart, no error. If I try the floppy again, this time it completes correctly, and gets me to the screen that it has completed, press a key for it to restart, and remove the disk. But, still, I get a restart when it goes to startup windows 95. Not sure if that wrong ms-dos version error gives a clue or not.

I'm using an ASUS p4c800-e deluxe motherboard with 3.0GHz Pentium 4 processor. A motherboard made in 2003 I believe, which puts it right in the XP era, but ASUS does provide 95/98 drivers for the board. Although as I found setting up 98 it requires proper configuration. I have it set to legacy mode to use IDE and not the S-ATA ports. My intent is a multiboot machine that does 95, 98SE, XP. So far I do have a dual-boot 98SE/XP setup (on a solid state s-ata drive, to use when the bios is set to use the secondary ide and s-ata. But for the purposes of setting up 95, it's set to not use the s-ata ports, and I have a 8GB drive setup on the primary IDE that I'm attempting my 95 install on) I do have the board maxed out at 4GB of RAM (which nothing will ever use all of it on since I can't run a 64 bit OS on there....but the documentation points out once you use more than 1 stick of RAM it only supports pairs, so I can't just throw in 3 sticks and expect that to not cause problems. I guess I could have done a pair of 1 and a pair of 512....but, I had 4 sticks of 1 kicking around, and they all test out fine) I did have to modify the system.ini and apply another patch to get the 98SE to work properly under those circumstances. Even after that, I ran into problems where once I started installing drivers, I'd lose the ability to open a command prompt (error about not enough resources), which I believe was due to too much memory even though the system.ini was modified. I found another patch (will need to dig that up again) that resolved this issue in 98SE....but this isn't all that relevant just yet, because for troubleshooting purposes I do have a stick of 256 that I'm using when trying to setup 95. I'm setting up 95 OEM Service Release 1....I have my reasons for wanting to play around with such a primitive version of 95, and realize going newer would give me better chances for success. So basically I use a boot disk to get to a prompt, fdisk to setup a 2GB partition on the IDE drive, format the drive, run setup, and the first part runs fine. After the reboot, it resumes, and crashes out by restarting without an error. So that's what led me to search on this and find this thread. So I started over, new format, run the setup, get to the reboot part, booted with the repair tool, repair tool ran and did it's thing, reboot, the setup resumes and crashes out exactly the same, restart, no error. I can start in safe mode, but since it hasn't finished setting up, all it does in safe mode is tell me to restart and not choose safe mode. If I do the stepped startup (I forget what they call it), it prompts me a series of Y/N questions, and it immediately restarts with the enable devices or drivers or something like that (I can get the right details on this when I get home this evening) I can't get an error or log to really give me anything to go on here, as it just goes in this cycle of restarting. Once it's happened, I never see it try to resume the setup, immediate black screen/restart. Not sure what I can troubleshoot next.

This is cool.....unfortunately, not working for me. PC still reboots when trying to resume the install. What next?