95 clean installation

Having neither a system disk nor a booting disk, I started to reformat the HD (installed with Win 95).

After the format c: command, everything is deleted.

When the notebook is rebooted, the screen says "F2 for setup" and becomes black.

If a key is pressed, it says "In valid system disk, replace the disk,.....

I have a cd of Win95 full version. Also I ordered a copy of booting disk now.

Please help me. I want to reinstall Win95.

 

Thanks for a quick reply.
I will post the result once I get a booting diskette.

 

This is what I did to install Win 95

1. Copied and ran 95 boot disk from Bootdisk.com on Floppy drive of my desk PC.

2. Ran the boot disk on th floppy of the notebook that I want to install Win95.

3. The screen says :starting Win 95 .......

4. Then it says: there is no drive for cd-rom. The driver name is " Banana "

5. and A: appeared.

And I am stuck now.

When Win95 CD, OEM full version, was inserted and run, obviously nothing occured.


Please help me!

 

Try this, download a WIN98 bootdisk and boot up to that. It should ask if you want CD-Rom support or not, pick the one with the support. When it finishes booting up near the end it will have told you the drive letter for the CD-Rom (probably E and you will be at the A: prompt.

This is where you start to use DOS commands, type the drive letter of the CD-Rom and hit enter, if the the drive is E: type E: and enter. Once you're at the E: prompt type copy win95 c:

That should copy the win95 folder and all of it's contents to the C: drive. When it's done copying type c:\win95 and hit enter. You should be at a prompt that says C:\WIN95

Now type setup and hit enter and follow the prompts.

HTH

 

A Win98 boot ( startup ) disk will do you much better.

Because ( if I remember correctly ) the 95 boot disk did not have CDROM support.

BillyBob

 

Successfuly completed clean install of Win 98

Thank for all the reply.

This is a success story for a beginner who finally completed a clean installation.

1. a 98 custom boot disk from the Bootdisk.com was copied and run on A drive.
2. The floppy was loaded, and "a:\ " appears.

3. at a:\ prompt type "copy *.* c:" to copy all the files onto C: drive

4. Once copying is completed, at a: prompt,
type "edit autoexec.bat "

5. Then a few lines of statements appear.
Read carefully. Because you want to load a driver for cd-rom.

6. From these statements, I made a simple change on two statement lines.

First, changed A: to C: in the line saying "LH A:\mscdes.exe /D: mscd001
Secondly, changed A: to C: again in the line saying "Set Path=A:\

7: So now the statement looks like this:

LH C:\mscdex.exe D: mscd001, and Set Path=C:\

NOw I think a driver for the CD-ROM is installed, so that it can read a CD.

8. Finally inserted the Win98 CD, OEM Full Version in the CD-Rom drive. and continued to intall Win98.

This is it!!!. For a beginner, I am very happy now.
I believe the same sequence will work for Win95 too.

Thanks again.

 

?????????????????

Help PLEASE. Am I missing something somewhere ??

Please clue me in here. This is something that I have never even heard of.

WHY ?????? Did you copy the files from the Floppy to the HD ?? And make changes ?

As far as I know there is no need to. The SUD will do it all.

Plus Windows ( any version ) seems to install better when booted to the floppy from a power off state.

I may be thinking wrong here BUT.

If you did indeed copy the file of the SUD to the HD I have a atrong feeling that EVERY TIME you boot, files will be copied to a RamDrive. That is a function of the Autoexec.bat ( which I believe is now on the HD ) on the startup disk.

BillyBob

 

Another wild idea.

The DOS files that you copied from the floppy to the HD will mot certainlu be of a different version than the ones that Windows will install.

UNLESS You install the same version of Windows that the Floppy files are from. Which I assume is Win98.

If you install 95 YOU COULD BE in for trouble.

BillyBob

 

Hi, BillyBob,

You raised good questions.

First of all my notebook has only one slot for floppy and cd-rom drive.
Therefore when booting from a:\, although the driver for the cd-rom drive was there, the computer could not find the cd-rom drive and thus could not be recognized or used. So I needed to copy files from A:\ to C:\. Then by booting from c: drive, I could swap out the floppy drive and replace it with the cd-rom drive, so that when the computer looks for a cd-rom drive, it is there.

For those who have both floppy and cd-rom installed together, like desk pcs, I believe, it is not necessary to copy files from A to C.

One correction on the previous posting is that editing of autoexec.bat file was done at C:\ instead of A:

Also the steps I did not elaborate was:
after the editing of autoexec.bat file, it was saved by clicking "file" and "save ".
after it was saved, the cd-rom drive and floppy drives were swapped. Then I rebooted the notebook, and it booted from C: drive.

Afterwards, in order to initiate installation of Win98, I went to the D: drive and typed "setup ".

This command started to install Win98.

By the way I did install Win98 instead of Win95 that initially I had in mind.

Again I am very new to this, this is the best of my reasoning.

Hope this will clear your questions.

If there are other thoughts, please post. It would help me to understand further.

Thanks.

 

Successfuly completed clean install of Win 98

Hi, BillyBob,

Yes, whenever I booted the notebook, the Win98 startup screen asks me to select either 1 (with cd-rom support) or 2 ( not). Thus I choose 1. and it goes through several steps showing several lines of statemant and again Win98 screen pops up. I tried to answer your comment about the nature of autoexec.bat file. I hope I am right.

If there is a different way of booting, i.e. bypassing the choice step (1 or 2), please let me know.

The steps I discovered (?) for a clean installation is not the best way , I think.

Thanks.

 

Hope this will clear your questions.

Yes. It is helping to understand why.

Now I am really confused.

Well first off I did not know that notebooks were that way. Unless it is/was a special ordered setup ?

Are you saying that the Floppy and the CDROM Drive use the same slot ?

Yes. That is true.

Putting thiings together now it looks a bit differrent.

You say that you can not have a floppy and CDROM Drive at the same time.

The quote above says ( at least to me ) it is an OEM ( HP, DELL, Compaq etc. ) with no Floppy. So that says to me that the machine is designed to boot from and install Windows from the CDROM using the OEM CD.

Also I wonder about the Memory that is being used by the Virtual Disk ( RamDrive ). Will it or will it not confuse Windows/ Windows DOS ?

Today is a very busy day for me so I will be back as often as I can to check.

BillyBob

 

Make a backup of your autoexec.bat and config.sys. Then open the originals in notepad and delete everything in them. That should get rid of boot menu and any confusion that may arise from the ram disk that gets loaded. The worst that can happen is if you've installed any programs that make entries to the autoexec.bat or config.sys, you'd have to reinstall them. Win98 (and 95) doesn't need either of the files to boot.

The other alternative is to remark out each of the lines in them that you don't want to run. You do this by putting rem followed by a space in front of each line that you don't want to run. Seems to me it would be easier to just delete the contents of the files.

 

Clean installation, BillyBob and Zander

Hi, BillyBob,

Yes, my notebook, Gateway Solo 5150, has only one slot. So I have to swap between floppy and cd-rom when necessay. My other Solo notebook has two slots. (By the way we, two of us have three pcs and two notebooks. It is handy to have notebooks and one pc, even they are old 333mhz, in family room and bedroom, so that we can do quick email or internet using wireless network. My other two pcs are recent models, 1.8 GHz & 2.4 GHz. so they are good for other work.) However we are just beginners in handling this kind of things.

Yes, the Win98 CD has to be booted from the CD-ROM.

Lastly, as in the previous posting, when Win98 starts, it asks a choice 1 or 2. So my notebook goes through DOS and Windows, I think. Ram-wise, I am not knowledgable enough to answer that comment.

Hi, Zander, I think your suggestion is right, however I did not try yet.
Would you tell me how to do "open the originals in notepad "? Once all files are deleted, starting of Win98 will go straight by eliminating the choice process.

Thank you all.

 

I am not straightened out on the only one drive slot bit.

BB

 

As I understand it you have to connect the Floppy drive or the CD drive through a PCMCIA card slot.

In this case, had I known what you were up against I would have suggested that you change the boot sequence in BIOS to boot to the CD-Rom first, then you simply put in the WIN98 CD and boot to that and install. The Win95 CD, as far as I know, wasn't made as a bootable CD so this method would only work if you were to install Win98 or newer.

 

Open notepad, click file>open and then browse to where the file is, double click on it and the contents will be displayed in notepad. They are just plain old text files with a fancy name.

After thinking about this a bit though, another possiblility would be to just rename the two files. Maybe rename them to config.old and autoexec.old. Then, if you keep the contents of the floppy copied to the hard drive and if you ever had to reinstall windows for some reason, you can just rename them back. Either while in Windows or in Dos. It would save you the trouble of having to go through all the things you had to this time. Unless I'm missing something here, I don't think you've really created a problem (not a huge one anyway) by doing this. Rename the files or delete the contents of them and then see what you have.

 

Possible problem.

Or at at least something to think about. ( or maybe I am thinking too much )

The RamDrive is actually assigned a DRIVE letter.

If the autoexec is left as is and any drive letters above D: ( should be the RamDrive ) have been set up it may be trouble BIG TIME if the RamDrive is all of the sudden removed.

BillyBob

 

I thought about that too but unless I'm forgetting about something, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Any programs that were installed before the change might cause trouble if they require the cd to be in the drive to run the program. However, that can usually be fixed by reinstalling the program. Otherwise, I don't see to much trouble resulting from this. Time will tell.

 

I just did a bit of testing.

I booted a 98SE machine with Partitions C: thru J: Just had to find out.

From a power off boot to the SUD the RamDrive was set to K:

So it looks like it would only effect the CRROM(s)

So it does check the HD partitions which I did not think it did.

I will test it on this one just to be sure.

BB