Downgrading from Win2000 to Win95!

[Alister]

Hi,
I upgraded my laptop OS from Win95 to Win2000, but found out that a few things were not working properly. I just want to reinstall my Win95, but the computer denies to boot from the CD! I have of course changed the boot sequence to CD first! I can only use a CD drive or a floppy drive at a time!Any ideas? :confused:

[pentachris]

Well, what you need to do is get DOS with CD-ROM drivers on your hard drive after you've wiped it and re-formatted. Then you would plug in your CD-ROM, reboot to the DOS on your hard drive and run the Windows setup program.

And the reason it's not booting to the CD is because the Win95 CD isn't bootable.

[Alister]

Thanks man. I appreciate it.

[Alister]

By the way, if I do so, will DOS recognize my CD drive?

[pentachris]

If you've got CD-ROM drivers, yes.

I'm going to pull some info from your other post (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=36389) and keep it all in one thread - it's less confusing that way.

You said there that you've got a D partition on your hard drive that you plan to leave intact? Is it a FAT partition or an NTFS partition? Is there enough room there to copy the contents of the 95 CD there (all you'd need is the WIN95 directory and its contents)? If the answers to those questions are "FAT" and "yes", you could do the copy, boot to your floppy, format your C and then run Windows setup from the D partition, installing it to the C.

If not, someone's going to have to help me out. I think you can copy the contents of one of these boot disks (http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm) to your freshly formatted hard drive and boot to it without problem... but I'm not 100% sure that'll work. If so, you could then boot into DOS on the hard drive and run setup from the CD-ROM. If not, you'd have to SYS the C from the boot floppy, copy the needed driver files over and configure them in the autoexec.bat file. I'd have to look up how to do that and get back with you.

[Dan Penny]

"you can copy the contents of one of these boot disks (http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm) to your freshly formatted hard drive and boot to it without problem... "

Not quite. All the files at that link are for creating bootable floppy disks.
Download the 95B file and use it (run it) to make your bootdisk on your floppy. Once made, you can boot the machine with it. Boot files will have to be loaded on C:, so at the A:\> prompt type;

sys c:

You should see "System transferred". C: is now bootable.

These files will have to be copied over to the C: drive root directory;
(Copy/transfer with a floppy)

CDROM_Driver (such as http://www.cyberus.ca/~danpenny/VIDE-CDD.SYS)
MSCDEX.EXE (http://www.cyberus.ca/~danpenny/mscdex.exe W95C ver.)

config.sys - Notepad: one line;
DEVICE=VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:IDE-CD
(Save as config.sys)

autoexec.bat - Notepad: one line;
MSCDEX.EXE /D:IDE-CD /M:10
(Save as autoexec.bat)

Once these are in place, you can boot the system and have your CDROM drive available. It'll tell you the Drive Letter assigned to it at the end of the boot.

When you get the C:\> prompt, put your 95 cd in the drive and type in;

x:\setup (where x is the CDROM letter assigned)

and windows installation should start.

If you have any questions or problems, post back.

[Alister]

Why do I need to sys the C drive? I have DOS diskettes which when booted to will install DOS onto my hard drive. Then I'll just have to transfer the CD driver, then do the rest as you guys wrote. Or
What if I burn DOS onto CD, boot to DOS on CD, once I have the prompt, switch CD with win95 CD and run setup?

[Paleo Pete]

Why do I need to sys the C drive?

To make it bootable. You only have floppy or CD ROM, not both at one time. That means copy files to the hard drive one way or another. The best way to do that is make the hard drive bootable. So either install DOS, or use a win98 start up disk and run the sys c: command to make the hard drive bootable and set up CD ROM drivers. Then you can switch to the CD ROM drive to copy files.

If you want to install DOS, that will work fine, these guys weren't aware that you had DOS available to actually install, which would work just as well but use up a couple more MB of drive space. (4MB or so if I remember correctly).

Then you have to have CD ROM drivers, so you can copy the win95 installation files (the entire win95 folder on the CD) to the secondary partition. If you have DOS drivers for your CD ROM you can install them from floppy pretty easily, or manually copy the MSCDEX file and edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load the CD ROM.

If it were my system I would go ahead and install DOS (if it.s DOS 5 or later) then CD ROM drivers, since on an older win95 machine I like to be able to boot into DOS from time to time and run scandisk or defrag, play DOS games and so forth.

[Alister]

When I insert the first DOS floppy, it says that it is going to install DOS onto the hard drive. That's why I wonder why I should do everything manually with the sys command.
Wouldn't this installation make C bootable?

[Dan Penny]

Yes. Once it is load your cdrom driver and use the dos mscdex.exe in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files respectively.