Hi, I've been given an old Dell pc, p2, 233mhz, 32mb, 4g hdd, which I'm trying to load w95 on, when i first turned it on, after POST, it gave error like 'non-system disk error, remove disk from drive A: & press enter' but there wasn't a disk in A:. I used a boot disk & did 'sys c:' at the A http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gifrompt, which managed to copy the system files including MSCDEX.EXE, rebooted and it came to C:\ prompt. I then put win95 cd in drive, changed to D:\ & typed 'install', 'install.exe', 'setup', and nothing seems to work......what am I missing? I'm a novice so pls can you explain really simply, thanks!

Welcome to the forum:

When you get to the C:\> prompt,
type D: and press enter
If you get a message about invalid drive specification you did not install the drivers for your CD ROM.

You will need to start up with a WIN 98 startup disk and start the computer with CD ROM support. Once you do that, follow these easy steps

1) Type C: and press enter
A) if you see C:\> proceed to step 2
B) if you and thing after the C: besied the \> type CD\ and press enter

2) Type MD WIN95 and press enter

3) Type CD WIN95 and press enter you should see C:\WIN95>

4) Insert the Windows 95 CD into the CD ROM

5) Type copy X:\win95\*.* where X is the drive letter of your CD ROM

6) after the files have copied, type setup

7) Follow the bouncing ball it's just a waiting game after that

Good luck

Thanks very much, it worked & that pc is now up & running & I can stop pulling my hair out !!
I'm now thinking of changing the pc I'm currently using from w95 to w98, if I put the w98 boot disk in & do the same .....will it work or do I have to reformat the hdd first?

Hi JKT,

You sound about the same stage as me in things! So I hope you don't mind a reply from a novice.

If you've got two machines now, which I think you have, just use the one you've recently got going to practise on. Try doing what you want to do (upgrading from 95 to 98) on the new machine. 98 should work fine on it. I guess the insall of 98 will ask you if you want to save your old systems files etc. There's no need to in this case as you've only just installed it there.

On the whole clean installs are better I believe - that's an install which isn't over the top of the old OS.

Small drives are good to practise with, they scandisk, defrag and format quicker. If you get the chance, practise FDISK as well, you could partition your 4GB into two, no problem.

Pete

Hi,
Mind? you're kidding, I'm only too glad of any advice/help I can get.....

I've actually got 3 pc's: the 'main' one is running w95; an old dell pc - mentioned previously - running w98 now! & an ancient 486 which I've had for several years & didn't think it worked any more but I've just installed winnt v.4. on it for study purposes....... I'm now getting brave enough to try things out on the older machines - that way I've still got this pc running ok......if anything/everything goes wrong!

Thanks for the advice & regards

JTK

Originally posted by PeteSchiffer:
Hi JKT,

You sound about the same stage as me in things! So I hope you don't mind a reply from a novice.

If you've got two machines now, which I think you have, just use the one you've recently got going to practise on. Try doing what you want to do (upgrading from 95 to 98) on the new machine. 98 should work fine on it. I guess the insall of 98 will ask you if you want to save your old systems files etc. There's no need to in this case as you've only just installed it there.

On the whole clean installs are better I believe - that's an install which isn't over the top of the old OS.

Small drives are good to practise with, they scandisk, defrag and format quicker. If you get the chance, practise FDISK as well, you could partition your 4GB into two, no problem.

Pete