trying to install windows 95 on an old pentium III PC

T

timbo59

Member
I have a ton of old computer games from the 90's that I have kept stashed aside all these years and just recently I got a hankering to play a few of them for old time's sake. Even by today's standards some of them were pretty good, though more along the adventure style, such as the various versions of Myst and so on.

At any rate, I have 3 - 4 PC's of various vintages sitting around and the most suitable seemed my old Pentium III 1ghz unit. Now I know it worked when I retired it, but try as I might I cannot get the thing to boot. I keep getting 'BOOTMGR is missing - Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to start' yet every time I do so it just goes to sleep, reboots, and gives me the same message. I ducked into setup and checked the boot order, and everything should be working as it's geared to look at the HD first. So figuring that there might be something corrupted on the HD I tried doing a fresh install with Win 95 but can't get any joy, even though I changed the boot order to look at the CD unit first. I just keep getting the same error message. I tried another PC of more or less the same vintage and it keeps asking me for the boot diskette - who still keeps those around!? :)

Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong? It's been so long since I went through this that I may be missing an obvious step I've forgotten about.

Thanks in advance
 
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Installing windows 95 required setup boot floppies to start the install. You have to wipe the drive first.
 
oh great, looks like I'm screwed then - I don't have any floppies. I have the necessary cabling to attach the HD to my present PC as an external unit and wipe it that way - would that do as far as that side of things is concerned?
 
@Beers - why would I want to put Linux on it for win95 specific games? I know you can use wine and all, but that seems a bit of a stretch! :).

As for installing XP or 2000, I seem to recall trying to play some of these games in that kind of environment 8 - 10 years ago and running into some issues, including certain graphics that would speed up to insane levels even when I tried making the system backward compatible to play the games.

As for the other, I did wonder whether I might run into hardware issues - we're always trying to cram upgrades into our older units, not the other way round, so I wasn't sure how it would work. That's why I picked out the Pentium III unit - I thought it might be old enough to counter any issues - I think it was built around 2000 and actually came with 2000 loaded in, though from memory I think I upgraded it to XP. I don't think I have any PC's left lying around with 486's on board, which is probably when a lot of these games came out!

I'll take alook at some of those links. Thanks
 
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