Installing OEM Win95 over Win 3.1

Hi, Luke!

Hope your friend isn't expecting too much in the way of performance with this system! I put W95 on a 486/120 once - and that was as slow as I could stand it!

To answer your first question, the definition of "new computer" - as far as Microsoft is concerned - is simply a PC which does not already have Windows on it. A freshly formatted hard drive with nothing more than DOS on it would certainly qualify. In fact, the OEM CD really shouldn't care at all. It should install W95 on the machine whatever the case. In fact, it can do both new installs and upgrades - whereas the "upgrade" CD will only do upgrades. Installing a "new" copy of W95 is nothing more than telling the install process that you want to install the entireproduct *as though* it had never been installed before. Otherwise, the CD has no other way of identifying the PC as truly being "new" except that it finds a copy of Windows already loaded on the hard drive. All else is considered "new".

As for accessing the CD-ROM, that is certainly important and is easy to accomplish! Make a DOS boot floppy and make sure it loads up the CD-ROM driver. Then boot up from the floppy. After it's booted, pop in the W95 CD and run the SETUP.EXE program from the CD. Windows will do the rest from there.

Good luck!
- michael

1. You need the appropriate DOS driver for your CD installed. Then;
2. The Windows 95 OEM CD checks only for WIN.COM. Delete or rename this to WIN.BAK. Boot to DOS with the CD driver loaded. Run setup from the CD-Drive. As a bonus, it will actually perform an upgrade if you install it over the top of the 3.X install.

Cry-babies...

MY first Win95 machine was a mere shoebox filled with spare parts and odd bits of wire running Office 91 and Visual Assembler. It used the scraped-off mag stripes of expired ATM cards for disk storage and only had 1K worth of little yellow sticky-notes for memory! My suffering was so hideous that I actually died and was reincarnated as a consultant...

:)

- mike

First off what size of HD? If it's below 1GB then your only going to be able to format at FAT 16. (partial useage of WIN95) Fdisk the HD, set active partition for DOS then format. Boot up to a bootable disk, load your CD-ROM driver disk in the system, then type setup "X", X being the CD-ROM drive that your copy of Win 95 is in.
If you know a authorized OEM Manufacture in you local area he could make you an OEM install disk to do all of the above instructions in sequencial order.

1st question: Are you saying that the CD is telling you it will ONLY do a complete restore of the drive when you try to run setup? If so, does your friend need the apps and data already there? Trust me, its best to back up the data, wipe the drive, and do a 'clean' install of '95 anyway.

2nd question: Is the CD complaining about the actual brand of the computer? That one is a little harder but not impossible. Feel free to email me specific and detailed info including EXACT quotesof the messages.

Ralph