ElmerFud
asked on
Running win95 off a Zip Disk
I'm quite proud of myself that I got Windows 95 to run off a zip disk. I don't have a hard drive in my computer at all right now. Western Digital is sending me a new one because mine broke. It was no small task.
Anyway, I'm driving my zip drive with Iomega's guest.exe program for DOS. I've got my IDE zip and my paralell zip in there. Windows 95 claims that I'm running in compatibility mode. This is because it can't find a driver to replace one of my devices (the zip drives). Before, when I've install Win95B, it recognizes my IDE zip disk without any other drivers. It calls it a "Removeable Disk" but it works. Therefore, win95 has the protected mode driver, it's just not using it. Is there anyway to tell '95 to use the protected mode driver that it has and not the DOS one in my autoexec.bat?
My guess is no, because Windows is running off of the device of which it needs to replace the driver of. (that's a mouth ful) :-)
Anyway, If you've got an answer that works, it's worth a 100 points. Please don't try to "answer" this question until I've accepted your answer in the form of a comment. That way I can delete this question when noone comes up with an answer.
later,
Elmer
Anyway, I'm driving my zip drive with Iomega's guest.exe program for DOS. I've got my IDE zip and my paralell zip in there. Windows 95 claims that I'm running in compatibility mode. This is because it can't find a driver to replace one of my devices (the zip drives). Before, when I've install Win95B, it recognizes my IDE zip disk without any other drivers. It calls it a "Removeable Disk" but it works. Therefore, win95 has the protected mode driver, it's just not using it. Is there anyway to tell '95 to use the protected mode driver that it has and not the DOS one in my autoexec.bat?
My guess is no, because Windows is running off of the device of which it needs to replace the driver of. (that's a mouth ful) :-)
Anyway, If you've got an answer that works, it's worth a 100 points. Please don't try to "answer" this question until I've accepted your answer in the form of a comment. That way I can delete this question when noone comes up with an answer.
later,
Elmer
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My answer would be YES to this question!! But it depends on your mother boards BIOS. Under BOOT SEQUENCE, LS/ZIP is an option along with the usual ones. This is straight from the motherboard manual for an ASUS SP97-V Motherboard Book.
ASKER
My mother board is old. It would be cool it could drive the zip drive with out anyhelp, like a bootable CD-ROM. That would definately solve my problem. It would have also saved me a lot of headache. Right now, I'm booting off my floppy. My MSDOS.SYS is pointing to my ZIP disk. In my config.sys I had to add himem.sys ifshlp.sys and setver.exe. Those are things that win95 automatically puts in the config.sys when it boots. Kind of hard to load e:\windows\himem.sys when the driver for my zip isn't in yet. Coping those three files to the floppy and putting them in my config.sys was the key to making it work.
Try using a Win95 boot disk instead of dos then use the guest95 instead of guest
also make sure your bios is not detecting the zip drives as they are software driven
also make sure your bios is not detecting the zip drives as they are software driven
ASKER
bgndepot,
You can't run a windows program from DOS. Guest95 is clearly a windows program. I am using a windows 95 boot disk. Even if you boot off a win95 boot disk, you can't run a windows program. Make a win95 boot disk, copy notepad.exe to it. Boot to that disk and try to run notepad. It doesn't fly.
Anyway since MasseyM doesn't seem to know how to follow directtions, I'm going to award him his 0 points and give hime a D because he didn't answer the question.
You can't run a windows program from DOS. Guest95 is clearly a windows program. I am using a windows 95 boot disk. Even if you boot off a win95 boot disk, you can't run a windows program. Make a win95 boot disk, copy notepad.exe to it. Boot to that disk and try to run notepad. It doesn't fly.
Anyway since MasseyM doesn't seem to know how to follow directtions, I'm going to award him his 0 points and give hime a D because he didn't answer the question.
ASKER