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General discussion

Adding win95 to winxp

Feb 13, 2004 4:52AM PST

I have a hp pavillion with factory installed winxp,how can I save my system files to reinstall after formatting my hard drive?

Discussion is locked

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Re:Adding win95 to winxp
Feb 13, 2004 4:59AM PST

"I have a hp pavillion with factory installed winxp,how can I save my system files to reinstall after formatting my hard drive?"

Let's get brutal here. It's very sure to me that you will not find Windws 95 drivers for your new machine. One of the effects of 9 years of since 1995 is that a new machine will not have drivers for that OS.

Maybe you can share why you would want to do this?

Bob

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Re:Re:Adding win95 to winxp
Feb 13, 2004 5:02AM PST

I have a full install cd for the win95.does this not have the drivers included?

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Microsoft win95 retail CD does NOT have all the drivers. In fact...
Feb 13, 2004 5:33AM PST

You'll find that the video will be some 16 colors at 640x480 pixels, the USB will not work, there may be no access to the CD/DVD drives and more.

If you have something other than what was known as 95 OSR2, the on top of all that, you will get all of 8 Gigabytes of total disk space in 2 gigabyte partitions.

Please consider this to be a fun learning experience about drivers and more, but nothing usuable will happen with such modern hardware and this old OS.

You may receive one of the following error messages:

* Device IOS failed to initialize.
* Windows Protection Error.
* You must reboot your computer.

The first error is a result of a divide exception in IOS.VXD, the second is due to a similar error within ESDI_506.PDR or SCSIPORT.PDR. This problem is very intermittent at 350MHz. Note that it is necessary to reboot the computer after the error occurs. If the error does not occur, the system will run normally.

But all this is up to you to discover.

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Re:Microsoft win95 retail CD does NOT have all the drivers. In fact...
Feb 13, 2004 6:39AM PST

All I need to know is:How do I save my system files to reinstall after reformatting and partitioning my hard drive.

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Re:Re:Microsoft win95 retail CD does NOT have all the drivers. In fact...
Feb 13, 2004 6:59AM PST
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CD-RW or CD-R is what I use to save files to.
Feb 13, 2004 6:59AM PST

"All I need to know is:How do I save my system files to reinstall after reformatting and partitioning my hard drive."

You'll want to backup what you want before this step.

You haven't shared if you have a backup device, so I can't tell if such is possible. There's also the issue that "system files" are normally an OS, which you would have on install or restore CDs so those are usually not a concern to backup.

Maybe a re-write of what you are trying to accomplish will help.

Bob

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Got to put Xp on first
Feb 13, 2004 9:10AM PST

I got 98 and xp on my HP computer got to put xp first then Use partition Magic to make Partition because HP uses recovery disk after you have xp on put partition magic in and make parttition then install 95 drivers on mine went in fine but you going to 95 might not work. might see if there is some drivers on the net might work.

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Re:Re:Microsoft win95 retail CD does NOT have all the drivers. In fact...
Feb 13, 2004 5:47PM PST

Win95 system files to Win XP ???????

Well, to answer your question directly, this directly answer may be what your are after:

Fire up your Win95 OS, save/copy to lots of floppies or a CD, if you can find a CD writer which works with Win 95, the Windows folder, or contents therein. Then you format, install Win XP, and do what you want with the 'saved' Win 95 files.

But- we do not really understand why you would want to do this. Do you mind sharing more ? What are you trying to do ? What problems do you have ? We are here to try to help, if you let us.

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Re:Re:Re:Microsoft win95 retail CD does NOT have all the drivers. In fact...
Feb 15, 2004 7:36AM PST

You may also consider using usb, 95 does support it, and using a cdrw external drive, and having the option to copy to larger media. usb support drivers for 95 are on microsoft's site and you may need to acquire them to have usb support for 95, as well as from my knowledge usb 2.0 is also possible in 95, I have teched a system with a Dell owner who put a usb 2.0 card in their system and it would not find the driver on cd, which I performed extracting the driver inf file from the cd, copy and pasted it into the Windows INF folder, then opened the add new hardware wizard, and pointed the inf (or driver file) to the Windows INF location, and it installed the usb 2.0 card and the owner was happy with the installation. 95 can run some things, but if you wish to save it on media, you will need a cdrw drive, and consider the suggestion above, I am using the Iomega CDRW/DVD combo drive (usb 2.0) no issues and works in 3 operating systems ( I multiboot, 98SE, W2K Pro SP3, XP Pro SP1), and the Iomega 750 MB usb 2.0 zip drive for saving large files, a zip drive may also be a consideration, then with XP you can perform a file migration from your media.