A guide to installing Windows 95 with FAT32

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Hi all.

I wanted to post a guide to help those who want to install Windows 95 to a retro computer. Many of you will probably know how to do this anyway but there are many that don't. Hopefully this simple guide will help others.

Years ago when I worked for a computer re-use charity we would just use MS-DOS 6.22 along with the CD ROM Device Driver to get D: drive then install Windows 95 from there and that is fine if your hard drive is less than 2 GB. A lot of the computers back then had small hard drives so there was no need for a FAT32 system.

First of all I would like to keep things simple as possible.

This Windows 95 installation can be done on computers with no floppy drive as well.

Your floppy drive A: will be inaccessible during the installation. This is because Windows 98 will create a virtual A: drive.

Things you will need... you will need a Windows 95 CD and a Windows 98SE CD.

Pop the Windows 98 S.E CD into your computer "make sure your optical drive is the first boot device in your BIOS"

Boot the computer with your Windows 98 CD and select the third option in the menu "Start CD without support"

Run the Fdisk command delete any partitions, if there are none then create a primary DOS partition. Select option "Y" to enable large disk support.

Reboot your system with you Windows 98 CD but this time select "the 2nd option "boot with CD support.

Type "CD WIN98" press enter

Then type "Format c: /s

Once complete type "CD .." to exit

Eject the Windows 98 CD and put in your Windows 95 CD

Type "CD WIN95"

Then Type "Setup"

You can now begin installing Windows 95. You will get an error message during installation about drive A: being inaccessible, just click cancel each time.

Once Windows 95 has installed all your drives including your floppy drive will function as normal.

You now have a FAT 32 system in Windows 95
 
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