🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian Almquist wrote:
> 
> Greetings:
> 
> I got some problems with my computer for some time, I am stationed
> (military) in the middle east and we often loose power,  I suspect this
> damaged the startup files in Win95 because I often would have to restart my
> system a couple times before it would complete set up (I tried reinstalling
> windows with no fix of the problem)
> 
> After a lot of fiddling I ended up with a more damaged system than I began
> with.  Having all the program disks for my system I made the decision to
> reformat the hard drive.  What I have forgotten is the DOS commands to
> reestablish the partioning and so forth.  I have a 4.2 GB fixed drive and
> have tried going through "FDISK" to get it to recognize the large drive
> using FAT32 but have had zero luck.
> 
> What do I need to do to get the system to recognize this drive without
> having to divide up the disk to 3 drives.  I know the system is FAT32
> capable because before my problems, the drive was recognized as a single
> large drive.
> 
> Thanks any assistance you can give will be great, over here the internet is
> my only connection to any assistance.
> 
> Brian Almquist
  This is a "oh shit" problem, almost related to the famous chicken and
egg problem.
  1) Assume you have an unformatted and brand-new drive
  2) Almost all versions of Win95 demand DOS (ver 6.0 or later, but they
will not tell you that), and most also demand (with others crying but
not neednig) Win3.x for installation from scratch.
  What this means, is that this requirement forces a FAT16 system (the
only one DOS itself can create).  Well, if you could boot into Win95's
version of DOS and have *all* of the nice utilities available, then one
could FISK and have a FAT32, then could FORMAT under that DOS, etc;
hence the chicken and egg similarity.
  Now, there are dozens of versions of Win95 and no way to differentiate
between them, except OEM versus retail versions; you may be stuck in
installing win3.x ...
  Fastest possible procedure (assuming your version of Win95 does not
*demand* win3.x), assuming you have a clean version of that
not-too-useful "Windows Startup" disk that it had you make:
  a) Boot with it and FDISK the whole drive, and FORMAT it (at this
point the chicken is alive).
  b) Now, one has the harder part to create the AUTOEXEC.BAT and
CONFIG.SYS files and load the CD driver to the hard drive.
  c) The hard drive should boot and the CD should be accessible at the
C: prompt (at this point the chicken is clucking).
  d) log to the CD (many Win95 versions *demand* that it be drive D) and
log to the proper subdirectory (which can *not* be \win95 if it does not
exist), run Setup, cross yoyr fingers, eyes and toes.
  e) If the install works, then the egg has been hatched and you are in
business.

  If this is not possible, then you may be forced to use a third party
32-bit driver to initialize the hard drive, then add DOS, Win3.x, then
Win95.