Hard drive issues Windows 95

[VirtualyConfused]

Hi, 1st time poster so I'm sure you've got help for a newb.

I'm running V.Box under WinXP, trying to setp up a Win95 OS.
I've tried setting up with both a .hdd hard drive and a .vdi hard drive. Each time I run setup from my Win95 CD it just blows me out with the "Windows setup requires 7340032 bytes available on your c: drive"
I've used fdisk to set the disk up, viewing the partition I notice theres no label, also I was wondering about partitioning a FAT file when our XP machines run NTFS?
Are there any issues?

Can anyone give me a suggestion as to the best set up for this scenario.

Many thanks

[VirtualyConfused]

OK no clues offered.

Can someone then, recommend which type of virtual drive is best to use?
Failing that can I hook up an old "physical" hard drive and use that?

Cheers

[FrodoHobbits]

It has been years since I installed 95 but I'm sure that once you have created the partition using fdisk, then you need to format the hard drive.
A:\> FORMAT C: /S
Then you can start the install.
A:\> D:\WIN95\SETUP /IS
This is assuming that D: is your virtual CD drive.
The two command lines are from very old notes that I made so hopefully they may work for you.

[mpack]

Use VDI, which is the default and the native format in VirtualBox. In general, if VirtualBox offers you a default, use it until you know better than VirtualBox.

In this case your problem is nothing to do with the hard disk container type. It's not even anything to do with VirtualBox, your problem is that Win95 didn't come with a bootable installer on CD. You will very likely have to boot from DOS first, so it can fdisk and format the boot hard drive. You also need to install CDROM driver and extended memory handler. Then you boot from the hard disk, insert the non-bootable CD and run the installer.

Incidentally, Win95 is not a supported guest OS, so you'll probably not be pleased with the results even after you get it working. IMHO Win98SE is the only member of the WinDOS family you should consider installing (also not supported, but again there's a howto available).

[VirtualyConfused]

Thanks guys

I was hoping that when I ran the Win95 setup it would format the disk for me during setup, been a few years myself.
If I format the disk in DOS it's going to limit me to a 2Gb drive and I'm not sure how my old copy of Partition Magic is going to fair with virtual disks (on new ground here).
Well when I get out of this dungeon called work I'll give it a whirl.

Cheers

[mpack]

2GB is not a serious limitation for a WinDOS era PC, in fact that's the size I have for my Win98SE test VM. ps. You haven't said what version of Win95 you are trying to install. It would need to be OSR2 to support bigger partitions.

[VirtualyConfused]

Thanks, solved though now I remember why we all hated installing Win95

I had to get the 3 x DOS 'image' floppies, and swap between them in the settings window.
The harder part was trying to find a "MSCDEX.EXE" image disk so I could install the cd rom drivers. I gave up and instead booted with a win98 boot image disk which installs the CD rom and then you can start installing from the Win95 CD.

I'm sure I going to come back with more problems, like why I've got such a crappy basic agp card in the settings.

Later guys.

[mpack]

I assume you mean VGA, since VirtualBox doesn't do AGP.

Win95 graphics defaults to 16-color VGA until you install drivers for something else. It's an unsupported OS, so there are no VirtualBox graphics additions for it. For Win98SE I installed the BearWindows VBEx driver discussed in the tutorial mentioned above, but I don't know if that works in Win95... I would guess not, because a change to the driver infrastructure is one of the main (and less visible) changes between Win95 and Win98. Still, it might be worth checking out.

Basically, you need a generic VESA graphics driver that works on Win95.

[VirtualyConfused]

Oh my god! Your right this is aweful. I think i'm gonna scrub it. Well at least it reminded me of y we were so eager to get away from 95
Thanks anyway.