Unlike my previous post, setting up Windows 95 is considerably different. Again I’ll be using Oracle VirtualBox 5.1.4. Windows 98 ISO Download Free Full Version. It is complete bootable Image of Windows 98 ISO. Download Windows 98 Bootable ISO in single direct link. While it can be made to work in a useable state, it wasn’t offered the same support to the likes of Windows NT 4.0 or 2000. There were a few revisions of Windows 95 since product launch generally offered for the OEM market, the latest being OSR 2.5. My personal preference is OSR 2.1 as it didn’t come preloaded with Internet Explorer 4.0, which had a tendency to bloat the general Windows interface with web orientated options akin to Windows 98. OSR 2.1 came instead with Internet Explorer 3.0 which kept to itself and more inline with the original Windows 95 interface. Not only that but I found IE 4.0 on real hardware of the time (e.g. A Pentium 100 with 16MB RAM) to be fairly sluggish in comparison. For this the process should more or less be the same whichever you choose, however I’ll show you with the OSR 2.1 release. For this guide you’ll need to have: • Oracle VirtualBox installed • CD or ISO image of Windows 95 (you also could use the floppy disk version) • Windows 95 boot disk • SciTech Display Doctor 7.0 Beta Setting Up The Virtual Machine As I’ve covered a little more detail in setting up a virtual machine in VirtualBox with Windows 3.1, I’ll be skipping over some of the details and be more straight to the point here. Open up VirtualBox and select New. A Create Virtual Machine dialog box will appear allowing you to select which operating system it will be using for this virtual machine (VM). You may either select the Windows version as shown below, or type Windows 95 and the drop-down selection will automatically change. After this, select Next. The following option now is to choose the amount of RAM. By default as Windows 95 had been selected, the recommended memory size is 64 MB. Windows 95 will run on the lowest option of 4 MB, though won’t be satisfactory. An historically accurate amount was typically in the range of 8 MB to 32 MB. For this, we will leave it as is. Now the option is regarding a hard disk for the VM. As we don’t have one yet, we will select the Create a virtual hard disk now option and choose Create. Again as we’ve chosen Windows 95, VirtualBox has suggested the recommended size of the hard disk to be 2 GB. Choose VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) and Dynamically allocated over the following couple of options before choose the size of the hard disk. If you are using the very original version of Windows 95 (the retail version) or OSR 1, it’s recommended to keep the disk size at 2 GB. If you are using the OSR 2 or later release you may increase above this as these support the FAT32 file system. Again as I’m using OSR 2.1 I’m going to increase it to 6.4 GB, an accurate size for a physical hard disk in the late 1990s. Retail and OSR 1 set the size no longer than 2GB, otherwise you may increase. Started with the Windows 95 boot disk. Although one could start Setup from the Windows 95 CD with their CD-ROM drive as R, it tends to cause an issue during installation, in particular at the point of installing drivers in the final stage. This is because during installation the floppy boot disk is no longer required and will boot from the hard disk instead once most of the files are installed. When this occurs, Setup is still expecting to find additional files on Drive R and although you can change the path to search for the required files elsewhere, it won’t let you access the CD as the driver for the CD-ROM wasn’t loaded. Setup can still be completed, though this has the likelihood of causing missing file errors during Windows start-up or Device Manager in Windows showing issues afterwards. To avoid this hassle, I tend to copy the main Windows 95 Setup files onto the hard disk after partitioning and formatting the hard disk. That way, the final stage of Setup can then still access the CAB files it is requesting to extract the required files for installation without trouble. At the C: > prompt, type md win95 and press Enter. This creates a directory (folder) named win95 on the hard disk. Then type copy r: win95 *.cab c: win95 to copy the main installation files from the CD to the new directory on your hard disk. If you wish to change Drive R for the CD-ROM to something else, type at the A: > prompt edit autoexec.bat to open AUTOEXEC.BAT in MS-DOS Editor to change the designated drive letter. As highlighted below, change the R here to a D. Save and exit MS-DOS Editor and restart the VM.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2019
Categories |