Need help installing Windows 95

[nguitars]

I'm using this software to run old music programs I had once used in Win 3.1 and 95.  I select advanced when setting up the Virtual Machine to make sure it has usb support so it can hopefully use my usb MIDI interface in Win 95.  I had owned a Windows 95 CD but it got lost a long time ago.  I got a win95.iso installation file from this link.  It is from Google docs so this has to be legit.  The file is 599 MB which seems kind of large for Win 95, but It detects the file as Windows 95, and sets up the virtual machine normally, creating the virtual disk.

I am follow these instructions for installing win95.  Once the virtual machine is set up and powered on, the boot disk is on drive A;, and the installation CD is on drive R:, called BANANA. It seems to boot up normally, but there is no drive C:. I use FDISK as per the instructions and that seems to go as it should, but it says I must reboot Win95 for the changes to take effect.  When I reboot ("reset") it, I get the error Missing Operating System_.  I delete the virtual machine and set it up again, this time not rebooting and I use the command FORMAT C: /S.  Then I get "Invalid drive specification"  If I switch to drive R: and use the included setup program, I get "Could not create temporary directory.  If your disk is NTFS file system, (etc), you must create a Dos boot partition." even though the virtual disk file is on a FAT32 partition.  Also, it seems that that is what FDISK is supposed to do.

If I can just get over this hurdle I'm betting the rest will be smooth sailing.  Thanks.

edit by wila‌ "It is from Google docs so this has to be legit." funny, because Google owns Microsoft? No it isn't legit, everybody can upload files to google docs, removed the -obviously illegal- link as per "Terms of Use" of this site.

[NatalieEGH1]

This is more along the lines of nguitars' problem.  I am retired now and wanting to play a lot of the old games that I loved dearly.  I have repurchased most of those that were on floppy only as I no longer have a floppy drive.

I cannot get Windows 95 to install.  My original install from years ago was on 10-12 floppies. I recently purchased a new copy on CD (I think for Compaq's) complete with COA with the Product ID so I could "register" it.

I downloaded an iso for the boot floppy as 95 was not stand alone.

I defined the system with a floppy using the iso as the floppy.  It has 96MB given to the system for RAM.  It has 2 processors assigned.  It has a single 20GB drive assigned.  When I start up it finds the floppy but not the CD or hard disk.  This means I cannot access the setup.exe and even if I could it would be loaded nowhere.  I have tried dir a:, dir b:, dir c:, ... and get a successful dir on a:, a fail/abort on b:, and invalid device for the rest.

I have looked at the directory where the vm should be stored and all except the .iso boot files are missing  (no vmx, no vmdk, ...).  What as I doing wrong.  With the exception that my first 95 machine was 2 2GB WD drives, 2 3.21 Seagate Baracudas, and 1 Hitachi (forget size but it had the software I used for it and the Seagates) it is defined basically as my very first Pentium machine.  The only real difference being that one was CD only, 5 1/4 floppy, 3 1/2 floppy, and 2.88Kbps or some such figure for my Hayes modem.

How do I get my VM files?  I might even be able to modify my .vmx if it were there but it is not.

Also does anyone remember what the old config.sys and autoexec.bat files looked like.  My memory does not stretch back that far.  In the mean time I will try redefining as 5 hard disks not a single one.

[NatalieEGH1]

I have done more detailed searching.  Onto R: it copies the information on A: plus two files DRVSPACE.BIN and IO.SYS.  There is a DRVSPACE.SYS in both locations.

I have found my vm files.  They were under c:\users\natalie\my documents\virtual machines\windows 95.  I had meant to create them on my 😧 drive with all the others VMs.  I cannot find my CD Drive in the .vmx file.Also I seem to have two devices pointing to my .iso for the boot diskette:  ide1:0 and floppy0. 

I went ahead and ran FDISK on C: and D:.  They were limited to 2047MB each.  Could not define further logical drives.  Also could not seem to be able to define further drives in the original edit for hardware to  allocate to the system.  There is no way to add an additional hard drive.

I still cannot see the CD drive.  Is it because it is actually a DVD drive?  The messages received during startup are:

CD-ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channels Supported)

(C)Copyright Oak Technology Inc.  1993-1996

Driver Version          : V340

Device Name           : BANANA

Transfer mode          : Programmed I/O

Drive 0: Port=170 (Secondary Channel), Master  IRQ=  15

Firmware Version      : 0000

MSCDEX Version 2.25

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp.  1986-1995.  All rights reserved.

          Drive r: = Driver BANANA  unit 0

I think this means the R: drive should be my CD drive but as indicated I am basically finding what is on the A: drive plus two files.

I will publish more as I find out more.  Of course outside help is ALWAYS welcome.

[NatalieEGH1]

I believe I have just finished installing Windows 95A.

I had to do the following things:

1.  I had to define 2 CD drives.

    a. The first CD drive is a PHYSICAL drive and contains the Windows 95 full version disk.

    b. The second CD drive contains an iso image for the boot disk.

2.  I had to remove the floppy drive that I had defined as containing the iso for the boot disk.  It appeared to be ignored.

3.  I broke my hard drives into no bigger than 2048MB.  This is because of using 95A.  I think 95B actually supports disks bigger than 2GB.

4.  Boot.

5.  My system set the CD drives as R: and S: where S: is the Windows 95 installation disk.  Verify.

6.  Run FDisk on your hard drives.

7.  Reboot.  (I could not exit VMWare window so did Ctrl Alt Del and when I got to the blue screen I selected shut down but canceled.  This issued the Ctrl Alt Del to the VMware window also.  It came back saying no os found.

8.  Go into the .vmx file and at the top add the line - "bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE".  This forces VMware to go into its BIOS software.  You need to change the boot priority (or at least I did).  It had:

     removable devices

     Hard Drives

     CD drives

     network devices

As I indicated my floppy drives with the .iso boot files appeared not to be recognized even though they showed up in the .vmx so I had removed them.  I changed the order to:

     removable devices

     CD drives

     Hard Drives

     network devices.

9.  I booted up and formatted my C: and 😧 drives.

10.  I changed to the S:

11.  I ran setup (I chose custom install and got errors on what appear to be files used for networking (I did not select))

12.  I rebooted but was back at the CD boot.  I started to try and get into the BIOS again but too fast again.

13.  I checked the .vmx line.  It had been automatically changed to "bios.forceSetupOnce = "FALSE""

14.  I changed back to true setting and restarted using Ctrl Alt Del again.  (Now realize I could have used Ctrl Alt Insert

15.  Windows finished its install.  I got a lot of error messages because I chose custom install.  I suggest using Express install.

16.   I have just shut down and restarted.  Still getting errors on the files I did not install.  Oh well, 2 seconds of clicking through them (about 8 messages I think).

17.  Everything seems to be working normally (except for the previous defined errors - REALLY chose EXPRESS INSTALL!!)

18.  Now loading VMtools.  I expect no further problems.  Oh and theVMX file is again set to "FALSE" for entering the VM BIOS software.

I hope this helps you.  I will be using the same when I create my Windows 98SE VM next week.  (I still have my disk but lost my key so buying another copy, unfortunately it is not PLUS so no pinball machine this time).

[Neil1T]

A few things to help you with here.

The Windows95 install, as I recall, came with more than one floppy.  As such, to boot it, I would suggest using one of the pre built ISO images you can find here.  Note the iso image is 3mb.  Larger than the largest standard floppy which is 1.44mb.  Which is probably why your floppy image failed in the first place.

As you found, you will need 2 x CD drives to install Windows in this way.  The key problem you were having is that the DOS CD driver setup was being lost during the install and Windows did not have the driver for the VMWare DVD drive.  The best and easiest way to do this is:

Don't try and do the VMWare automated OS setup.  Use manual.

Create one 2GB drive for this VM, complete the VM creation and leave it closed.

Attach it to a more friendly VM, say XP

Boot XP, partition the drive as primary, active and format it FAT16

Attach your windows95 CD to the XP machine

Copy the Windows95 (or 98) install files to the new 2GB drive in a directory like "install" off the root.

Close XP and remove the drive from the VM, don't delete the drive, just remove it from the VM.

Attach the Win95  boot iso in the link above (the 3mb one) as the CD drive by iso image

Boot the VM from the iso

From the DOS directory on your boot disk, you need to run SYS.  You will need to run SYS <boot iso> <hard drive> where the drive letter for the boot iso is the first parameter and the drive letter for the hard drive is the second.  In my instance, I would have the boot iso as A: and the hard drive as C:  so my command would be Sys A: C:

Then change to the hard drive, change to the install directory and run setup.

This will get Windows95 or 98 to install from the VM hard drive and not from any CD or floppy.

If you don't do it this way, when Windows installs, it will try to access the install media and will fail because the VMWare tools is not installed to allow Windows to access it and the DOS drivers from the boot iso will be discarded.

You could faff with the config.sys and autoexec.bat on the C: drive before running setup, which (might), fix the problem.  But why bother.  Install from hard drive and the problem doesn't even exist.  I stopped installing Windows95, even on a physical machine, from CD, a long time ago.

This will get rid of all your problems because the iso won't even try and boot once the HDD has been sysed (so long as the hard drive is before it in the boot list).  Windows95 (or 98) will install from the fixed hard drive and you will get all the drivers you need when you install VMWare tools.

On the editing the vmx file for booting into BIOS, this keeps changing because it's a one time event.  You can do the same thing by selecting VM=>Power=>Power on to Firmware in the Workstation client menu.

Much easier.

Hope that helped.  I played with Chicago before W95 and have installed 95 literally hundreds of times in all scenarios.  Ditto NT3.1, 3.5, 4.0, 98 and XP.

You are buying a totally defunct, unsupported and non recommended Windows?  I know the generic product keys which work up to NT4.0 but won't put them here. 

I hope this helps and wish you luck with 98.  You can follow the same procedure with 98 but the drive capacity is a bit better so you might want a slightly bigger drive.....  95A only supported FAT16 which is limited to the 2GB.  98 Supported FAT32 which allows 32GIG without tweaks.

You might want to use another OS and share the drives on Windows networking, rather than trying to get Windows 95 or 98 to try and read larger drives, but that's up to you....

edit by wila‌ removed the "tip" on how-to search for illegal activation keys, that's not allowed as per the Terms of Use