Hey ole guys win 95

my accountant called me and said he wanted to backup his old HD to a new 40g hd. I told him his drive may be compressed. aNYWAY I tried to ghost it and it did not work. I now have a blinking c:\ . Anyway

Peace

 

From memory, a compressed drive creates a "virtual" drive that acts as an interface so you could be right about it being compressed. Adding the second HDD may have changed the drive lettering, so disconnect the second HDD and try again.

Some other thoughts:
Is it a plain flashing cursor or the C: drive cursor? The C: drive cursor looks like this C:\>_ and means it has booted into DOS. If it is a plain flashing cursor, that is when the BIOS is looking to find an OS, the cabling or drive jumpers may not be set up correctly (have you set the old drive as slave and changed it back without changing the jumpers or is there a "Master with Slave" jumper setting?

I don't see why it would boot into DOS , unless there were some errors reported as to why it could not boot to Windows or Safe Mode.

Would the 40Gb drive be to big for the BIOS (HDD BIOS limitation)? There should be a jumper to limit the drive to 32Gb, try using that. Anyway, run the HDD manufacturer's setup utilities. They will often tell you about setup/configuration problems. Those utilities will probably have a "cloning" program of their own if Ghost cannot run.

Check that all the data is backed up. If it is booting to a C: prompt, type and enter dir, if you see all the Windows files and folders everything should still be there.

I avoided compressed drives for reasons like this. If it is compressed you will need to research through Knowledgebase:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1
If it is not compressed you could install 95 onto the new drive, set the old drive as slave or secondary master and extract the data from it.

Win 95 was not very friendly when it came to "Windows will not start ", when I got to 98 I didn't look back.

Matt

 

Thanks for response win95

All that you say is true. But when I tried to ghost the HD. It said that there were errors and needed to run scandisk after it ran and corrected the errors the HD would not boot. So I stayed on top of it and got it to boot and now it looks like its going booting past the autoexec.bat files then stops with a standard c:\. When I run a dir I see that windows had been renamed to WINDOUS LMAO.... And there are alot of dir00000 files that I guess were truncated. Woo I miss WIN95



Thanks

 

If you see the Autoexec.bat instructions you should be able to boot into Safe Mode and run Window's Scandisk there.

If it is getting stuck at running Autoexec.bat (and/or Config.sys) you could probably back up those files (use Windows Explorer to rename them) and replace them with previous backups you will find in the root drive (C:\)...and even the originals (they will be the oldest backups).

I can't help you much past that, I have not needed to use backups of those files (I like 98 where they can be blank ).
Search for "startup autoexec.bat config.sys" at the MS KB:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

I found these:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/136337/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156126/EN-US/
What fun!

Luck
Matt