It’s been much longer between my posts than I’d like. We had a re-org at work a little while back and now I’m up for another position that I’m waiting to hear on. It’s like a desktop administrator position but more.I have a bit of a nostalgia bug and I found my old copy of Windows 95 a while back. I’ve been wanting to install it in a VM so I could play around with it again and remember old times.
WordPad is a word processor software with basic formatting options, and it is included in all versions of the OS since Windows 95 onwards. It has always been there, but never really used much.
I made an ISO from it, mounted it, and attempted an installation. I forgot back then that CD’s weren’t bootable and I didn’t still have the boot disk. I do, however, still have my old Win98 boot disk. I think it has corrupted, however.
It wouldn’t matter tho, I don’t think, as I only have an external floppy drive and the software back then didn’t support USB!So I looked on the net and found some boot disk images. I also did a quick google search to see how complicated it was for other folks. There sure are a lot of folks that had a lot of problems! I found it to be farely simple, to be honest.
I did get a few tidbits of info that helped me along in my adventure to figure it out. I’ll have several links at the end of the post. But here’s how I did it:I’m running VirtualBox 4.1.2 r73507 on Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bitI have Windows 95 “A” (although the boot disk I found will work for either, I believe)Boot Disk and Installation CD.
If you don’t have the original boot floppy you’ll need to get a copy of the boot disk image from:. Make an ISO of your Win95 CD and save it somewhere. You can mount this directly in VirtualBox which is nice. If you don’t want to do it that way, you can make another virtual drive and mount it in MagicDisc (another free app). An alternative is to create a single ISO that includes the boot disk and Win 95.
I’ve outlined that below, or you can skip to step 4. You can also burn both the boot disk and the Win 95 files to the same disc (but this as issues) to make one, bootable CD!. To do this in ImgBurn launch the program and select “Write files/folders to Disk”. On the window that comes up, the left space is where you add the folders and files (don’t forget both, they are separate icons) from the Win 95 CD. The icons are have magnifying glasses over a sheet of paper and one over a folder. I added the files and then each of the folders individually so that they will be at the root of the file structure.
Also add the program xcopy!. Click on the “Advanced” tab on the left and then on “Bootable Disc” below that. Check the box “Make Image Bootable”. Emulation Type: Floppy Disk 1.44MB. Boot Image: add the.img file you downloaded from above.
That should be it for your discs. I highly recommend having two ISO’s and just mounting them in VB, but hopefully the steps above will help you if for some reason you can’t do thatVirtualBox Setup. Started off by creating a new 5GB VDI Hard disk and making it Windows 95. I configured mine to use 512MB of RAM. BEFORE LAUNCHING THE NEW DISK you need to change some configuration. Right click on the new VDI in your list and go to Settings.
Select System on the left and you can configure your RAM size if you didn’t already. Thank you very much! This information helped me and the company where i work alot! We have some control units with technical problems for a hydroelectric plant in Colombia.
And the only way to recover them is through windows 95, this tutorial was really helpful. For the record i had two problem, first the same problem of bonezore, but i solved it with your reply and second was that i couldnt find the install file inside the C druve after i coppied it, problem was i had put it in 2 win95 folders, the root was win95/win95 hehe but i solved it. After you create the VM (and with it shutdown) you want to right click it from the VM Manager, go to Settings, and then the Storage tab. Select the “Controller: IDE Controller” line and then click the disk with the plus sign to add a CD/DVD. Select Choose Disk and then browse to the ISO file.
It should then be highlighted automatically and on the right side, under attributes, change the drop down. If it’s not an option in the dropdown, that means one of the other disks/drives in your storage tree is already set to primary slave, you need to find it and change it to something else. Just like on a physical PC, you can only have one device as each config.Hope that helps.
Microsoft’s Windows 95 was a huge leap from. It was the first release of Windows with the Start menu, taskbar, and typical Windows desktop interface we still use today. Windows 95 won’t work on modern PC hardware, but you can still install it in a virtual machine and relive those glory days.RELATED:This may be useful if you want to play an old game that doesn’t work in, although Windows 98 may be more ideal for Windows 9x-era games.
Or you could just do it for a little kick of nostalgia. We wouldn’t blame you. What You’ll NeedYou’ll need two things for this: A Windows 95 ISO file and a Windows 95 boot disk image. Unlike modern operating systems, the Windows 95 installation disc isn’t bootable.
You must first boot into an MS-DOS environment from a Windows 95 boot disk, which would have been a floppy disk at the time, to get the installation started.If you have an old Windows 95 CD lying around, you can insert it into your PC. While ISO files of Windows 95 are available online, bear in mind that Windows 95 is still under Microsoft copyright, and can’t be legally downloaded from the web. So start digging through those old drawers of yours.Once you’ve got your Windows 95 ISO file, you can download a boot diskette image from. You will probably just need to download the “Windows95a.img” file. Windows 95b (also known as Windows 95 OSR2) was only available to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), so any Windows 95 disc you have lying around will either by the original Windows 95 release (also known as Windows 95 RTM) or the Windows 95a release (also known as Windows 95 OSR1), which came with Service Pack 1 installed. Step One: Create Your Virtual MachineRELATED:We’ll be doing this in, which is completely free to use and available on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
You can do it in other programs like VMware, but the process of configuring the virtual machine software will be a little different.Once you have VirtualBox installed, click the “New” button to create a new virtual machine.Enter whatever name you like and select “Windows 95” from the Version box. If you name it “Windows 95”, VirtualBox will automatically choose the correct Windows version.Choose how much RAM you want to expose to your virtual machine. VirtualBox recommends 64 MB, while official Microsoft blog claims that Windows 95 won’t boot if it has more than around 480 MB of memory. You could split the difference and safely use 256 MB, which would be more than enough for old Windows 95 applications.Continue through the wizard until you’re prompted to create your virtual hard disk. VirtualBox will automatically suggest 2.0 GB, and you probably don’t want to go over that. The retail versions of Windows 95 only support the FAT16 file system, which means they can’t use drives over 2 GB in size.Windows 95b (aka OSR2), which was only released to device manufactures and never sold at retail, does support.
So, if you were using this version of Windows 95, you could theoretically use up to 32 GB of space.Don’t boot up the machine right after you’re finished creating it. First, you’ll need to change a few settings. Right-click your Windows 95 virtual machine and select “Settings”.Click the “System” category, click the “Acceleration” tab, and uncheck “Enable VT-x/AMD-V”.If you leave this option enabled, you’ll be able to install Windows 95, but it will just show a black screen when it boots up afterwards.Next, click the “Storage” category and select the virtual drive under the Floppy controller. Click the floppy disk button to the right of Floppy Drive and click “Choose Virtual Floppy Disk File” in the menu.
Browse to the boot disk.img file and select it.Finally, click the Empty disc drive under the IDE controller, click the disc icon to the right of Optical Drive, and click “Choose Virtual Optical DIsk File”. Browse to your Windows 95 ISO file and select it.Click “OK” to save your settings when you’re done.Step Two: Prepare Your Virtual C: DriveYou can now just double-click the Windows 95 virtual machine in your library to boot it up. It will boot to a DOS prompt.Note that the virtual machine will capture your keyboard and mouse once you click inside it, but you can press the host key—that’s the right Ctrl key on your keyboard, by default—to free your input and use your PC’s desktop normally. The key is displayed at the bottom right corner of the virtual machine window.First, you’ll need to partition the virtual drive you created. Type the following command at the prompt and press Enter: fdiskThis process is very simple.
You’ll be starting with an empty drive, so you just want to create a DOS partition. That’s the default option, which is “1”. You just need to accept the default options to go through the fdisk process.You can just press “Enter” three times after launching fdisk to create a DOS partition, create a primary partition, and agree that you want to use the maximum size of the drive and make the partition active.You’ll be told you have to restart your virtual machine before continuing.
To do this, click Input Keyboard Insert Ctrl-Alt-Del in VirtualBox. Press the right Ctrl key to free your mouse first, if necessary.You’ll now need to format your new partition, which will be available in the virtual machine as the C: drive.
To format it, type the following command at the A: prompt and press Enter: format c:Type Y and press Enter to agree to the format process when prompted. You’ll then be prompted to Enter a label for the drive. You can enter whatever you like, or nothing at all. Press “Enter” afterwards to finish the process.Step Three: Launch the Windows 95 InstallerYou will now need to copy the files from the Windows 95 ISO file to your C: drive.
Theoretically, you should just be able to run the Setup program from the disc drive itself to install Windows 95. However, this produces errors, as the disc drive isn’t mounted after the installer reboots, and the installer isn’t able to find driver files it needs. Instead, we found it much easier to simply copy the files to the C: drive and run the installer from there.First, figure out which drive letter your disc drive was mounted as. This is displayed when your virtual machine boots up. On our virtual machine, it’s the R: drive. If you forgot and can’t see it on your screen, you can always restart your virtual machine once again with the Ctrl+Alt+Delete option in the keyboard menu to view this info.Run the following command to copy the files from the Windows 95 disc to your C: drive, replacing R: with whatever drive letter corresponds to your virtual disc drive. Xcopy R: C:INSTALL /SWhen the process is complete, you can now switch to your C: drive and launch the setup program from the INSTALL program, like so: c: cd INSTALL setupPress Enter once again to continue when prompted.The graphical Windows 95 setup program will appear.
From here on out, you can do everything graphically without messing with the DOS prompt.The actual installation process is simple. On most screens, you can accept the default options and speed through the process.
You will be prompted to enter your Windows 95 product key before the installation process finishes, however. Different editions of Windows 95 require different product keys, so ensure you’re using the correct key.When you reach the Analyzing Your Computer screen, be sure to check the “Network Adapter” and “Sound, MIDI, or Video Capture Card” options to ensure all the virtual machine’s hardware is correctly detected and configured.When you’re asked to create a Startup Disk, you can select “No, I do not want a startup disk” to continue.
This isn’t 1995 and you’re not installing this on a real PC, after all.The actual installation process will be extremely quick on modern hardware, even in a virtual machine.At the end of the setup process, Windows will prompt you to reboot and tell you to remove the floppy disk from your computer. To do this, click Devices Floppy Drive Remove Disk From Virtual Drive. Click “OK” to reboot your PC and continue afterwards.The setup process will continue setting up your hardware. You’ll be told you have to provide a name to continue, but you can enter anything you like here.Finally, you’ll be prompted to provide your time zone and set up a printer. You can just click “Cancel” in the Add Printer Wizard window to skip configuring a printer when it appears.Finally, your PC will reboot and you’ll be prompted to create a password.
You’ll then be presented with the Windows 95 desktop. You’re done—you now have a Windows 95 virtual machine.To really get back into the 90’s, open Windows Explorer from Windows 95’s Start menu and head to the C:InstallFunstuffVideos folder. You’ll find music videos for Weezer’s Buddy Holly (“Weezer”) and Edie Brickell’s Good Times (“Goodtime”), which were included on the Windows 95 disc. There’s also a movie trailer for the movie Rob Roy, which was also released in 1995.The videos in the “Highperf” folder are higher quality than the ones in the main Videos folder, so be sure to watch those—your modern PC can handle them!