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View Full Version : Windows 95 error on recent hardware (new install)


Tweek16
10-19-2009, 01:51 AM
Hi,

I wanted to install a few operating systems on a 300 GB HDD I had lying around, and so I set about installing Windows 95. It has a lot of sentimental value to me as it was the first OS I ever interacted with, and a lot of the games I played as a child were designed for DOS/Win95.

I gathered info on how to install Windows 95, I made a partition using the boot diskette (it's 2 GB's, the max allowed for Win95) and installed Windows 95... no problem up to here. There were no errors during installation, the system re-booted and when the windows logo screen appears the computer gives me an error, "Insufficient memory to initialize Windows"

"Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your config.sys and autoexec.bat files, and restart your computer"

I played with it for awhile and then decided to install Ubuntu Studio (which, after a few attempts, installed correctly). The error still happens when trying to boot Windows 95.

Now, I did put all the utilities checked for the install (I'm using a system with 2GB RAM and a 1.6GHz Processor, which in my estimation is overkill for this OS), maybe that has something to do with it. I'm also thinking that maybe Win95 cannot address the 2GB RAM memory correctly. I replaced the 2GB memory with a 256 MB RAM but it still had the same error.

My question is, can I actually have Windows 95 in a separate partition and running on the type of system I just described? I read alot about the max allowable hard disk space (2GB), but there was no mention of max RAM allowable or anything like that. Perhaps I should do a reinstall, without checking so many utilities/optional stuff? Or is this an inherent incompatibility issue (Win95 vs. hardware)?

mjc
10-19-2009, 02:11 AM
Well, first off...you are hitting a major fault in the Win9x series...a very poor memory manager. Also, you probably into the timing issues that Win 95 was full of...

In other words, short of using a virtual machine that can convincingly 'lie' to Win 95 about what hardware is present, it ain't gonna happen...

Tweek16
10-19-2009, 02:58 AM
I was thinking maybe installing Windows 98, but I take it from your post it probably won't work either... Guess I'll have to search for a virtual machine that works in Linux...

Tweek16
10-19-2009, 03:02 AM
The original machine that it ran on had 16MB RAM. I tried running it in that machine but it did not even detect the hard drive... As you can imagine the original machine (where I had Win95 originally) is old and beat to hell. And the reason I can't use the original HD is because it corroded and would not respond. I opened it up (hey what the heck, no one's used it for years and no one needs it), and it had two areas in the top platter that were damaged. At least now I know what a FUBAR HDD looks like...

123456
10-19-2009, 09:10 AM
You should install XP or Vista and then use Virtual PC to run 95.

Tweek16
10-24-2009, 11:24 PM
I tried but my processor does not support virtualization...

123456
10-25-2009, 12:49 AM
It doesn't need to support virtualization to run Virtual PC.