Hi Gang, a number of you have asked us about reloading Windows 95*. Either to get rid of old baggage brought over when you upgraded from 3.1 or because of junk left on your systems from too many beta’s. If you still have your Windows 95 Upgrade CD, here are the instructions you will need. Make sure you BACKUP anything on the system you do not want to lose BEFORE you start. We are going to create a brand new install of Win95 and will erase everything on the system. You will need Disk 1 of the Windows 3.1* setup disks also, unless you have an OEM version of Win95. This process will take a number of hours depending on your system speed. I recommend BACKING UP the WHOLE SYSTEM before you begin. Good Luck

These are the instructions to be followed prior to formatting the hard drive

1. Create a boot disk you (can make it in Win95 if you wish) see below
2. Make sure that on the boot disk you have a copy of fdisk.exe, FORMAT.COM and mscdex.exe which live in the C:\Windows\Command directory
3. Copy your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT from the C drive (C:\ )to the boot floppy disk
4. Then you'll need to edit them to remove everything except the lines that load the CD-ROM and SCSI card if you have one.
5. In Config.sys change c:\whichever directory\cdrom-driver.sys /d:mscd01 to a:\ cdrom-driver.sys /d:mscd01 (replace cdrom-driver.sys with your cd-rom driver)
6. IMPORTANT: copy what ever cd-rom-driver.sys is called in the line above to a:\cdrom-driver.sys (replace cdrom-driver.sys with your cd-rom driver)
7. In Autoexec.bat change c:\windows\command\mscdex.exe /d:mscd01 to a:\ mscdex.exe /d:mscd01
8. TRY TO BOOT THE SYSTEM FROM THE NEW FLOPPY DISK. See if you can read a CD-ROM. If you can then proceed.
9. Reboot without the floppy
10. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SAVE ANY IMPORTANT DATA
11. Copy any important data off the hard drive to some other media (zip, jaz, tape or floppies)
12. Boot from the floppy
13. Run Fdisk and delete all the partitions
14. Exit Fdisk
15. Run FDISK.EXE /X (the x is very important)
16. Partition the disk the way you like, remember partitions over 1 gig use 32k for a 1 byte file (see table below)
17. Reboot the machine from the Floppy again
18. Format the partitions
19. Change to the CD-ROM Drive (probably D:)
20. Insert disk 1 of the Windows 3.1 disks in drive A:
21. Run Setup.exe from the CD_ROM
22. When asked for proof click on search A: drive
23. Follow the on screen directions.
24. Enjoy your new install of Win95

A Startup Disk

If you're not sure how to make a startup disk from Win95

1. Click start
2. Click settings
3. Click control panel
4. Double click Add/Remove programs icon
5. Click on the startup disk tab
6. Insert a blank floppy disk
7. Click on create disk

Table of logical drive sizes, FAT (File Allocation Table) types, and cluster sizes:

Kathy can be reached at kathy@12c4pc.com

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