
From: gordonf@vcn.bc.ca (Gordon Fecyk)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.win95.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.setup.win95,comp.os.ms-windows.networking.win95,comp.os.ms-windows.apps.compatibility.win95,comp.answers,news.answers
Subject: Windows 95 Frequently Asked Questions and Answers Part 2 of 14
Followup-To: comp.os.ms-windows.win95.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.setup.win95,comp.os.ms-windows.networking.win95,comp.os.ms-windows.apps.compatibility.win95
Date: 14 May 1996 01:40:27 GMT
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Summary: These postings list many questions asked in said newsgroups,
         and answers them as best as I can.  I make references to other
         Web sites and FAQs when appropriate.  Visit the WWW home of
         this FAQ (http://www.intouch.bc.ca/win95) for the appropriate
         links.  This section is the 2nd one: Installation
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Archive-name: windows/win95/faq/part02
Last-Modified: 1996/04/29
URL: http://www.intouch.bc.ca/win95/faq2.htm

2) Installing Windows 95 

Basics about Win95 vs Win 3.x and DOS you MUST know 
How do I install Win95 on a computer with... 
...nothing else on it? 
...DOS and Windows 3.x on it? 
...Stacker (tm) disk compression 
...>500 MB drive running Disk Mangler, DriveLamer, etc 
...Double/DriveSpace (tm) disk compression 
...OS/2 (tm) ? (any 2.x or higher version) 
...Windows NT (tm) ? (why?) 
...no hard drive? (diskless station) 
...notebook computer? 
How do I install Windows 95 from... 
...floppies? 
...CD-ROM drive? (Harder than you think) 
...network server? (including how to build a server based 
install) 
I'm having problems with... 
...rebooting after first part of setup 
...reading disk 2 
..."Safe" recovery 
...part two of setup can't read drivers from CD-ROM 
...part two of setup can't read drivers from network 
Can I install two separate copies of Win95? 
Top ten installation mistakes 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Basics about Win95 vs Win 3.x and DOS you MUST know 

Back up (Make a copy of) your hard drive first, if you don't know 
what you're doing! 

Windows 95 is a very different beast from Windows 3.1, different 
from MS-DOS, different from anything else out there. Treat it like 
Windows 95 and not like DOS, and it will install and perform like 
Windows 95. 

This is especially true with installation. Try to remove as many old 
DOS drivers, TSRs, disk compressors, disk managers, etc before 
attempting to install. Normally, Setup will recognize a host of such 
programs and warn you to remove them before continuing. Heed that 
warning! And if you have any doubts as to what Setup will do to your 
computer, back up your hard drive first! 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with nothing else on 
it? 

You need to prepare a File Allocation Table (FAT) partition on your 
hard drive to install Windows 95 to. The first bootable partition must 
use FAT file system, regardless of where you install Win95. If you 
bought the Win95 package designed for PCs without Windows 
(meaning NOT the UPGRADE) it will come with a startup disk for 
this purpose. The startup disk works much like the setup disk for 
MS-DOS 6.22; it will create a partition and format it for you. The 
disk also contains the traditional MS-DOS utilities like FDISK, 
FORMAT, SYS, HIMEM.SYS, to do this manually. 

It will then ask for Setup Disk 1 or the CD-ROM, which installs the 
Win95 setup wizard to take you the rest of the way. 

NOTE: Some OEM CD-ROM distributors might not have included 
an MS-DOS driver for the CD-ROM drive on the startup disk. If this 
is so, when the boot disk setup asks you for the CD-ROM disk, it 
won't find it. Tell the manufacturer to correct this. If you're 
adventureous enough to do this yourself, the CONFIG.SYS and 
AUTOEXEC.BAT files on the boot disk have instructions on how to 
add your DOS CD-ROM driver. 

If you choose to install the UPGRADE version on to an empty 
system, you will need a boot disk with the DOS utilities I mentioned. 
You will also need your Windows 3.1 Disk 1, as proof that you're 
eligible for the upgrade. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with DOS and 
Windows 3.x on it? 

Most likely you will have the UPGRADE version of Win95, and in the 
case of the CD-ROM version, you will already have a DOS 
CD-ROM driver loaded and working. Microsoft recommends you 
run Win95 setup from within Windows 3.1, which does work, but if 
you plan on installing Win95 in a separate directory than your existing 
Windows, you should run setup from DOS instead. Keep it simple. 

If you install from within Windows 3.1, and you choose to install on 
top of your existing Windows, be sure to allow Setup to copy your 
existing configuration in case you wish to un-install Win95 later. 

A safer bet is to install Win95 in its own directory, which gives you 
the option to dual-boot between your original DOS and Win95. 
Un-installing then becomes a simple matter of "DELTREE WIN95", 
and removing the remaining traces from the root directory (including a 
"SYS C:" to restore the original DOS system files). 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with Stacker (tm) 
disk compression? 

Microsoft recommends to un-compress your drive before installing 
Win95, but it does work with real-mode Stacker drivers. Just install 
normally, but keep your real-mode Stacker disk drivers installed 
when you do. You will lose performance on disk access as long as 
you maintain your DOS version of Stacker. Otherwise the same rules 
apply as for DOS and Windows 3.x. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with >500 MB 
drive running Disk Mangler, DriveLamer, etc? 

These disk managers allow systems, that otherwise can't handle drives 
with more than 1024 cylinders (A PC limitation, not really a DOS 
limitation), to work with these drives. They're typically larger than 500 
megabytes. 

Ontrack's Disk Manager (tm), and MicroHouse's DrivePro (tm) work 
OK with Win95's 32-bit disk drivers, so you can install like you could 
for an upgrade, but you should consider a BIOS upgrade and a 
system backup before attempting to install Win95 on systems with 
>500 MB hard drives. These disk managers can get wiped out by a 
boot record virus, making your system un-bootable! On a system that 
supports large hard drives by design, a virus strike will not cause such 
damage (though it will do other nasty stuff of course). 

One precaution to prevent a virus strike (and other mistakes, like 
booting off a non-system disk), is to set your BIOS to always boot 
from drive C: (like C: first, A: second, or C, A) so your disk manager 
software will always load before anything else does. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with 
Double/DriveSpace (tm) disk compression? 

Win95 comes with a 32-bit version of DriveSpace, and works 
straight away with any compressed drives created with MS-DOS 
6.22's DriveSpace utility. You also have the benefit of un-loading the 
DRVSPACE.SYS from conventional memory, freeing up 
conventional memory in DOS sessions under Win95. Simply perform 
your normall installation as per the Upgrade. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with OS/2 (tm) ? 
(any 2.x or higher version) 

Microsoft does not support installing Win95 on systems with OS/2, 
any version. Attempting to install Win95 on a system like this will wipe 
out any capability of starting OS/2. 

However, if you use Boot Manager, you can install Win95 in a 
partition of its own, or in the same partition as MS-DOS. This will 
isolate Win95 from OS/2. Setup will temporarily disable Boot 
Manager by making the DOS partition the active partition. To 
re-enable Boot Manager after installing Win95, run FDISK and make 
the Boot Manager partition (the little 1 MB partition of type 
Non-DOS) the active partition again. This also has the advantage of 
using HPFS file system on the OS/2 boot partition. 

Of course, installing Win95 on an HPFS partition is not possible. 
Win95 doesn't have any HPFS file system drivers yet, though I'm 
hoping for it. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with Windows NT 
(tm) ? 

Supposedly, Setup will recognize NTLDR.COM and insert itself into 
the list of OSes to boot from. As long as you have a FAT partition to 
install Win95 to, this will work. Win95 does not support installation 
on an NTFS partition either. 

If you want to triple-boot between DOS, Win95, and NT, MS has 
some wicked setup procedure that lets you use NTLDR to pick your 
booting OS (like OS/2's Boot Manager). The details are in the Win95 
Resource Kit. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a computer with no hard drive? 
(diskless station) 

NOT RECOMMENDED, though it is possible. The big reason is 
Win95 will use a network drive for its Virtual Memory swap file, 
which will cause heavy traffic on the file server. Put mininum 16 MB 
memory on each diskless workstation, to minimize swapping to the 
server. Also see How to prevent random hard drive access, to further 
reduce server swapping. 

To perform a diskless install of Win95, you need a server based install 
already on the file server. You also need a real mode connection to 
the network (either on a boot disk, or a virtual floppy on the file 
server via a boot EPROM on the network card). You merely install 
all the Win95 files into your home directory, wherever that is. 
Unfortunately, this only works with real mode network clients; you 
can't use 32-bit network components on a completely diskless 
workstation. 

If you use a boot EPROM, you need to make a virtual boot disk with 
the Win95 system files (IO.SYS etc) on it. Use whatever utilities 
come with your network server to do this. Other details are in 
Microsoft's Knowledge Base article Q133349. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 on a notebook computer? 

You merely install it on the notebook as you would on any other 
computer. Because of complications with CD-ROM and network 
support on some notebook computers, I suggest you use the floppy 
disk version, then upgrade to the CD-ROM version once you have all 
the hardware working on it. 

Setup will recognize special brands of notebook computers (Toshiba 
and Zenth for example) and you should tell it so if it did not. This lets 
Setup tune the power management features to work with it. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 from floppies? 

For basic systems, and notebooks, this is the best source to install 
from. Setup will detect all hardware it can, and add protected mode 
support for it. It does take a while to sit and flip disks, but you will 
have a clean installation afterwards. This also gives you a good excuse 
to delete or hide your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT before 
running Setup. 

First, boot to DOS, then run SETUP on disk 1. If you don't already 
have DOS on the computer, boot using any DOS disk and prepare 
the hard drive for a normal DOS installation. The Stand-alone version 
of Win95 will have a boot disk for this purpose. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 from a CD-ROM drive? (Harder 
than you think) 

You need a real mode CD-ROM driver in place to run Setup initally. 
My favorite method is to prepare a boot disk (or use the boot disk 
from the non-upgrade version) which loads the CD-ROM drivers, 
then runs Setup from the CD-ROM.) This way there's no chance of 
Setup arguing with a CONFIG.SYS file on the target drive. 

A boot disk only needs these entries in CONFIG.SYS: 

DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=(your CD-ROM driver) /D:MSCD001 (and whatever parameters it needs)

And these lines in AUTOEXEC.BAT: 

MSCDEX /D:MSCD001 /M:4 (and whatever preferences you have)
SMARTDRV 2048 2048

I suggest including SmartDrive to speed up the first part of installation. 
Include SmartDrive AFTER MSCDEX so it can cache the CD-ROM 
accesses. 

Another good bet is installing Win95 from within Windows 3.1, which 
is what Microsoft recommends, since you'll already have the required 
drivers to run the CD-ROM drive. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

How do I install Windows 95 from a network server? (including 
how to build a server based install) 

Server based installs work like they did back in Win 3.1, but you 
need to run a different setup program, NETSETUP.EXE, to install the 
server copy. NETSETUP comes on the upgrade CD-ROM version, 
and on the stand alone CD-ROM version in 
ADMIN\NETTOOLS\NETSETUP, but not on the floppies or OEM 
CD-ROM. And you can't get it from Microsoft's web site, either. 

Perhaps the two best avantages of using NETSETUP to make a 
server based install, are 1: you can do shared installs, saving local 
hard drive space, and 2: you can apply service packs and other 
components to server installs, which will take effect for server based, 
and local installs. Service Pack 1 Admin Edition includes a utility to 
apply the service pack to a server based install. 

To use NETSETUP: 

Install Win95 on one computer as a stand-alone, and install 
network support for it so you can write to the server drives. 
Run NETSETUP from the CD-ROM disk. It will list several tasks 
you must do to complete the server install. 
Do the first task: specify the target server and directory you will 
install the admin copy to. 
Do the second task: specify the source drive (usually the 
CD-ROM) and install. It will perform three passes of installs; one 
for stand-alone installs, one for shared installs, and one for the 
inital setup files. 
(optional) Write an installation script. The script editor is rather 
simple; you use the option menus to turn options on and off, to 
specify what network components to load, and settings for them. 
Done. Go to a workstation and run SETUP from the server to test 
the install, and any install script you wrote. 

One dumb thing about NETSETUP is you have to run it from 
Windows 95, which means you have to install Win95 once, then run 
NETSETUP on that station. NETSETUP will run in Windows 3.1, 
but you won't be able to create an installation script untill you run it 
from Win95. 

You could also just share out the Win95 CD-ROM over the network 
and run Setup from that, or copy all of the WIN95 directory to a 
single directory on the server, if you won't be doing any shared or 
diskless installs. 

NOTE: Installing the OEM CD-ROM version to a server using 
NETSETUP does not entirely work! The OEM version inlcudes the 
MS Internet Explorer from Plus, and the PRECOPY.CAB files 
contain references to those components. NETSETUP will not attempt 
to install those, which is why MS didn't bother including it with the 
OEM version. You could find out what files it looks for and manually 
insert them, but that's a bit of a pain. You'll just have to shell out the 
$250.00 for the non-upgrade, non-OEM, Win95 CD-ROM. 
Installing the UPGRADE version works, but it will bug you for Win 
3.1 evidence before it will install. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having problems with rebooting after first part of setup 

On systems with bizzare DOS configurations, you may get a 
"Windows protection error", or "This VxD conflicts with another 
driver already loaded". This is because a DOS driver loaded before 
WIN.COM loaded, and the protected mode driver can't load. 

To avoid this, just when the computer reboots for part two of setup, 
press F8 when you see "Starting Windows 95..." then select "Safe 
mode command prompt only". From here, delete or hide your 
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. Then re-boot and 
proceed with part two normally. 

You may get this error if you use an un-recognized CD-ROM driver 
(Usually the case for IDE CD-ROMs), or if you use a DOS network 
driver and a Win95 net card driver tries to load. The above technique 
will work around both these cases. 

If you have to do this, you won't be able to configure a printer or 
copy any other drivers until you finish Setup. No matter; if it asks you 
for Win95 files, just cancel, and wait until Setup finishes. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having problems with reading disk 2 

The disks come in MS's new "DMF" format, which holds nearly 2 
MB on a 1.44 MB disk. The first disk is a standard 1.44 MB disk, 
and Setup loads a driver to read the DMF disks. 

A DMF disk can get destroyed by a boot record virus, because the 
virus over-writes the DMF boot record. As a precaution, 
write-protect the floppies before using them. For some really dumb 
reason, Microsoft insisted on shipping the disks write-enabled. 

Setup will also try to write your registration info on disk 2. If you have 
the disk write protected, you can just hit "Continue" and Setup will 
continue without writing to the disk. For detals, read KB article 
Q136111. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having problems with "Safe" recovery 

If you re-run Setup on a bad installation of Win95, you will get a 
prompt to use "Safe Recovery". This will let you either Undo the 
install, or Redo the install using safer detection techniques. My 
suggestion is to Undo the install, then use the technique above, 
regarding Rebooting after first part of setup. Also, try installing on a 
target drive with no DOS startup files (CONFIG.SYS). 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having problems with part two of setup. I can't read drivers 
from CD-ROM 

This means Setup didn't load protected mode CD-ROM drivers for 
your drive, which happens for many reasons. This will only affect your 
ability to add printer drivers and setting up MS Exchange, both of 
which you can skip and do later. 

You should make sure, after finishing Setup, you bug the CD-ROM 
manufacturer for a Win95 driver. Also check the section on SCSI and 
IDE CD-ROM support. 

PCI IDE or PCI SCSI adapters won't kick in until the second 
re-boot, so such CD-ROMs won't work until then. Just let it finish 
and it will work. 

Later on, if you have to use real mode CD-ROM or net card drivers, 
you can add printers and set up Exchange once you can use the 
CD-ROM or network again. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm having problems with part two of setup. I can't read drivers 
from the network 

If you installed network support but you didn't get a network login at 
the start of part two (so you can access the file server), this means the 
Win95 network support didn't install correctly. As per the CD-ROM 
install, you can skip the Exchange and Printer setup until you get the 
protected mode network support working. 

PCI net cards won't operate at all until the second re-boot, when the 
PCI Bus driver kicks in. Just let it finish and your net card will work 
on the second re-boot. 

This could also mean you skipped network support to begin with, or it 
could not load a network card driver. Again, you can skip the 
Exchange and Printer setup until you correct this. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Can I install two separate copies of Win95? 

The problem with this is there's only one MSDOS.SYS file, which 
points to only one copy of Windows 95. You could edit 
MSDOS.SYS (which is just a text file in Win95) to point to either 
copy, but this is annoying. A better technique is to borrow someone's 
copy of OS/2 and install Boot Manager, then have two bootable 
partitions, each with its own copy of Win95. 

The first technique is great, however, for developers experimenting 
with their apps, without destroying their primary copy of Win95, and 
for those without friends using OS/2. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Top ten installation mistakes 

10) Hitting the "exit" button on the 13th disk 

9) Lending your install disks to a friend, after you let Setup write your 
name to Disk 2 

8) Installing on your station at work, without letting your M.I.S. 
manager know (He'll find out though...) 

7) Installing on top of Windows 3.1 without enabling Un-install 

6) Installing from a un-supported CD-ROM drive or network 

5) Installing on a system that doesn't work with 32-bit disk & file 
access in WFWG 3.11 

4) Restoring a backup of old Windows on top of your new Win95 
install (real dumb) 

3) Not doing a backup of old Windows before installing 

2) Leaving the floppies write-enabled while installing 

1) Installing Win95 in the first place (If you don't know what you're 
doing!) 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

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