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How do I create windows 95 installation floppy disks

Posted on 2005-03-16
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I have a set of Windows 95 Installation floppy disks that I use to load old laptops up (These very rarely have a cd drive). The problem is one of these disks has become corrupt. In the past I have used a Windows 95 CD to create a set of floppy disk but I can't remember what the command line options are to do this. Any ideas?
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Question by:landislund
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SunshineVK earned 250 total points
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Maybe this may be of some help
<http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/guiddisk.htm>

OR

How to create a floppy installation of Win95b (OSR2) using OEM cd-rom
 There have been a few times when I needed to install Windows 95 from floppy
 because a system didn't have a cd-rom. Not common since all new systems ship
 with cd-roms, but sometimes you run into an older system that doesn't have a
 cd-rom built-in, or you have a notebook and external cd-roms are too
 expensive. In my case, I bought a Compaq Prolinea 466 on eBay and it didn't
 have a cd-rom. I could have gone out and bought the cheapest one I could
 find, but this got me thinking about how to create my own installation
 diskettes from the cd-rom that I already had. I knew that you can't create a
 win95 install from the original release of win95 because the cab files were
 ~2MB in size. Too large to fit on a single disk, even if it was formatted to
 DMF (Distribution Media Format) size of 1.68MB. The Win95b version didn't
 suffer this problem because the cab files were just under 1.68MB so the only
 problem was formatting a diskette to DMF and finding out what files were
 needed on diskette 1, 2, 3 etc.
 The first disk needs to be formatted to 1.44MB. This is because a system
 without win95 cannot read DMF diskettes. Once win95 is on it, it can read
 and write to DMF (although it still cannot format one). The EXTRACT.EXE
 utility on the first floppy lets the win95 installer read and write DMF
 disks. That's why the installer can read disk 2, 3... during installation.

 Anyway, after a bit of tinkering (and cheating by seeing how others have
 done it), I came to the following set of files for disk 1. They all come on
 the cd-rom in the \Win95 directory. Simply format a disk to 1.44MB, give it
 a volume label of "DISK1" and copy these files from the \win95 directory on
 the CD-ROM. If you find yourself having to create win95 disks often then you
 could write a batch file to automate it.

 PRECOPY1.CAB
 DOSSETUP.BIN
 EXTRACT.EXE
 MINI.CAB
 DELTEMP.COM
 SCANDISK.PIF
 SAVE32.COM
 SCANDISK.EXE
 README.TXT
 SETUP.TXT
 SETUP.EXE
 SCANPROG.EXE
 WB16OFF.EXE
 SMARTDRV.EXE
 XMSMMGR.EXE
 WINSETUP.BIN


 Next, get your hands on a utility to create DMF disks. A good one is
 MaxiDisk available from www.herne.com. You're going to need 27 DMF-formatted
 floppies, so make sure to have more than that available. Most HD disks will
 have no problems formatting to DMF, but if you use really cheap disks then
 you may run into lots of errors. Set whatever utility you're using to verify
 the format. Don't forget to set the volume label as "DISK2". Copy the
 following files from \win95 directory of the cd-rom to disk 2.

 PRECOPY2.CAB
 WIN95_02.CAB


 Next, just copy the remaining cab files to the other DMF diskettes.
 WIN95_03.CAB goes on disk 3, WIN95_04.CAB on disk 4, etc. Don't forget the
 volume labels on these either.

 You're done. Now you have a set of Win95 OSR2 install floppies. What's nice
 about being able to create your own set of install disks is that if someone
 burns a copy with their name/company on it, you can undo the damage by
 creating a new disk. By the way, the registration info is saved on disk 2.
 So if someone goofs up your install disks by branding them, just recreate
 disk2. You will need to reformat the disk, since the user info is not saved
 in the files. Its saved on a sector in the floppy, so you will need to
 reformat the disk to DMF and recopy the cab files from cd-rom again.

Taken  from a newsgroup
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