Cant get Win95 to start...

xnyjyh

New Member
Hi we are having a problem getting windows 95 to run after fresh install to new hard drive. Its been formatted and connect for proper master hard drive.

When restarting to complete/finish the installing process An error comes up saying... ' insufficient memory....quite one or more programs or remove unecesssary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXE.BAT'

What does this mean?

What needs to be done to fix this?

The OS is installed but just need to get past this error

thank you :)
 
The problem may be:
1. You don't have enough RAM. How much does that computer have?
2. Your HDD may be full. How much space do you have on the HDD? (total disk space, not free space)
 
Enough ram indeed...

Yeah we actually have 1.5 GB of ram and its a brand new hard drive of 160 GB.

We were told to try less ram becasue of Win95 dosnt like more than 512mb for some reason.

But nothign seems to work

Gah! :/
 
Why are you exactly trying to install Windows 95 on a pretty new computer? You should try on a virtual machine (Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 - free or VMWare - not free), in windows xp.
 
well

he needs to install this OS so he can upgrade from there. without this OS functional we cant get the OS he wants to work. plus we dont have a boot disk for XP pro
 
Theres your problem...

Windows 95 has problems on PCs with 80GB or more HDD and
Windows 95 will not boot with 947MB of RAM or more. (I tested it on VPC to get the max amount of RAM)
 
ok, how do we format a hard drive that had XP on it but wasnt validated and detected from microsoft, we cant even start the old hard drive now because he had pirated version of XP! thats why we bought the new hard drive.
 
Just a thought, try or renaming your autoexec.bad and config.sys files so they don't run. I believe Windows 95 still relied heavily on "conventional" memory (the first 640KB). Many dos drivers loaded in this memory, before Windows loaded and placed files in the extended memory. If you had too much loaded, you would get memory errors. This was VERY common back in the day...

However, I also haven't tried to load 95 on such a new machine. It may have so much RAM it simply doesn't know what to do with it :P
 
ok, how do we format a hard drive that had XP on it but wasnt validated and detected from microsoft, we cant even start the old hard drive now because he had pirated version of XP! thats why we bought the new hard drive.

First you will need to use Fdisk to create a File Allocation TABLE (FAT) partition on your hard drive to install Windows 95 to. If you bought the Windows 95 package designed for a computer without Windows (not the upgrade) it will come with a start-up disk for this purpose. The start-up disk will create a partition and format it for you. It will then ask for Setup Disk 1 or the CD-ROM, which will install Windows 95.

If you want to install the Windows 95 Upgrade version on to an empty system, you will need a boot disk with the DOS utilities Fdisk, Format, Sys. First you will need to use Fdisk to create a File Allocation TABLE (FAT) partition on your hard drive. Here is how:

1. In the Fdisk Options screen, press Enter. The Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS Drive screen appears
2. Press Enter. The Create Primary DOS Partition screen appears
3. If you want the partition to be the maximum size, press Enter. Then insert your startup disk in drive A, and press a key If you don't want the partition to be the maximum size, press n, and then press Enter. Another Create Primary DOS Partition screen appears
4. Follow the instructions on-screen to specify the partition size you want, and then press Enter

You can specify the partition size as a percentage of disk space or in megabytes of disk space. If you specify a percentage of disk space, include a percent (%) sign after the number

5. Press Esc to return to the Fdisk Options screen, then follow the instructions on-screen to make the primary DOS partition active, and then return to the Fdisk Options screen

If you have not allocated all the space on a disk drive to the primary DOS partition, you can create an extended DOS partition and logical drives by choosing the Create Extended DOS Partition in Fdisk. You specify the partition size you want as a percentage or number of megabytes of disk space. If you don't want to create an extended partition, press Esc to quit Fdisk. Insert a startup disk in drive A, and press any key

Follow these directions, and see if you can somehow try to format the drive so it has less than 80gb. So it looks like 50% for you.
 
he needs to install this OS so he can upgrade from there. without this OS functional we cant get the OS he wants to work. plus we dont have a boot disk for XP pro
What OS exactly are you trying to install? Like what are you upgrading to from 95? I don't know of any OS that would require a pre-existing installation of Windows to work properly/install itself.
 
What OS exactly are you trying to install? Like what are you upgrading to from 95? I don't know of any OS that would require a pre-existing installation of Windows to work properly/install itself.

He doesn't have a bootable xp disk, so he installs win 95 and runs the setup from windows as an upgrade.

If 95 didn't work, you could try 98 :D
 
If 95 didn't work, you could try 98
Just like 95, 98 and even 98SE still have a lot to do with DOS at boot-time and during installation. 98 has the same 512MB memory barrier 95 does, and I've had my own share of trouble getting ancient hardware to work because they need DOS drivers loaded at boot.
 
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