W95 Freezes Up

Hi All,

I don't know too much about this OS, but I thought that I would try and help a friend get their PC back up and running again.

W95 boots up to the desktop, but then it all freezes up. Been trying to figure out how to fix this, but I'm used to W98 myself. Any ideas on what I need to do here to get it back up again?

The owner just bought a new PC with XP Home, but she has some valuable files on the old system that need to be salvaged.

Thanks

 

Hi Pete,

Is that possible? I mean, won't the 95 drive try to boot up along with the XP drive at the same time?

Edit: Will it void the warranty if I open the case? (HP computer)

 

For the moment, my friend is skeptical/worried about me taking the HD out of the old machine. She's afraid that the files are going to be lost.

Been trying to get this old Packard Bell machine to boot from a floppy.....It goes so far and then says to reboot......Also says something about himem.sys is missing.

I guess I could try to get a new copy of the file by typing in the proper command that I found on Google....

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000425.htm

Anyone delt with this before?

 

Hi Pete,

Before you had a chance to post, I downloaded a boot disc from the web and tried 2 of them (a & b).

Never could get the pc to do much with them....Config.sys is messed up, and I never could get the himem.sys file copied either.

On top of that, the CD drive is not recognized in the DOS prompts, but it shows up as "found" when the BIOS info is briefly displayed at startup.

W95 is a strange beast to me. Never had this problem with W98.

 

How large are the files she wants to recover? This may be a silly suggestion but can you use DOS to copy the files to floppies?

 

Not sure, but she is in the process of moving them to an onboard storage drive. After that, I think she is going to let me install the drive in my machine after all......or maybe hers.

The files are mainly jpeg's and stuff related to Print Master and some of Broderbund's other software. But the original software is so old that it will not install on XP, so she is going to have to update the programs and hope that she can import the old files into the new software.

This lady only uses her pc offline......She cares nothing about the internet.

 

Using DOS. The pc still locks up at the desktop.

She finally managed to get DOS to find the CD drive somehow, but still couldn't get any files copied to the Windows directory.

If I had the pc here at my place, I could spend more time with it and maybe find a fix for it. She's a good friend of the family, but she talks a lot about trying this and trying that, and her ideas make no sense to me and it makes it hard for me to concentrate on what I'm doing.

She's finally agreed to let me take out the storage drive and copy the files onto my machine, and then burn them to disc......(Took a while to convince her that the files stored on the HD would not disappear after unplugging the pc from the wall outlet)

 

If you used a win95 bootdisk it won't recognize the drive. It has no drivers for it. Use a win98 bootdisk instead and if things are working right you should have access to the drive then.

 

Finally got the 20g slave drive out and installed it in my pc. Was able to access all of the files and burn them to disc.

I now have the old pc here. I'm going to clean it up inside and see if that W98 boot disk works in it. This machine came with the W95 Companion CD.....What exactly is that?

 

I tried to boot it from my W98se boot disk, but I don't think that the floppy drive is reading it (Or any floppy disk as far as I can tell).

I'll install another floppy drive and see if that helps any.

 

Replaced the floppy drive, but I can only boot from a w98se boot disk. Trying to reinstall W95, but looks like I need a education in DOS in order to copy files from the Companion CD to C drive.....Not doing to well.

 

Well, believe it or not but I got the OS installed after all.

I did a lot research at Google and at BBS too (Kevin Saul had a post that helped me out some). I managed to figure out how to copy WIN95 from the E: drive to C:, then I found setup.exe on the web and unzipped it to a floppy and copied it to C: drive as well.

I then typed setup at the C: prompt and things looked like they were going to work, but then I got some kind of message about disk compression software and every thing stopped. I was too tired to do a Google search, so I hit the Esc button to close down for the night and the next thing I saw was W95 setup screen.

I followed the prompts and managed to install the OS. Everything looks good in the DM except for yellow exclamation icons at the communications port and the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro.

W95 sure is a bare bones OS!....Not much to it from my POV. I had to create the My Documents folder myself.

 

Hehe.....Computers have come a long way in 10 years!

Thanks for your help Pete and all of the other members that chimed in too.....Couldn't have done it by myself!