You really need to format the hard drive while it connected to the 386 using whatever solution you are using. Then you can copy the install files for windows 95 onto it. Then install windows while on the 386.

1. what canthearu said
2. you can't transfer a Win95 install made on a Pentium II to a 386 (or any other different hardware that is)
3. Win95 on a 386 is unusable. Not sure what childhood memories you have, but really, it sucks on a 386.

derSammler wrote:

1. what canthearu said
2. you can't transfer a Win95 install made on a Pentium II to a 386 (or any other different hardware that is)
3. Win95 on a 386 is unusable. Not sure what childhood memories you have, but really, it sucks on a 386.

I did use windows 95 on a 386-DX40 ... I somehow tolerated it. No idea how though, if I try these days, i'd get too upset and throw it through a window.

I ended up getting it working!

Here's what I did:

• Download and record a CD with Windows 95 RTM (first edition, OSR2 didn't run properly on the 386 - RAM?).
• Hook the hardware from the 386: the 545 MB HDD and its stock CD-ROM player to the Pentium II motherboard, then, insert the FreeDOS Legacy CD in it (to use it as a boot disk).
• Enter the BIOS setup and configure the hard disk manually in CHS/NORMAL IDE mode.
• Run fdisk and delete all partitions. Then, create a partition that fills up the drive but, now, running fdisk with the /X parameter, this will disable the LBA support that fdisk will try to use anyways (even if you tell it not to during the startup, so it's mandatory to type this one).
  
  Copy code to clipboard

  1fdisk /X
  

• Create the partitions as normal, once you're done, reboot.
• Install FreeDOS on the HDD, let it format the HDD itself, it's fine from now on.
• Boot off the HDD and insert the Windows 95 RTM CD in it.
• Now, while running FreeDOS, execute the following command:
  Copy code to clipboard

  1setup.exe /nm /is
  

  (as seen here http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Windows).
• Once the installer tells you to reboot your computer, turn it off and remove all the hardware. Plug it back to the 386.
• Boot it up, FreeDOS will find the CD player again, so any required file will be available from the 386 itself now.

That's it, once the installation is done, the computer should boot properly on its own hardware. If you're having trouble, you probably got some hard drive issues (ah these HDDs that won't last 30 years 🙁).

This is what I did to solve that issue as well:

• Download and install HDD Regenerator by Dmitriy Primochenko from the following website http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html. You might want to buy the full version, unless you have just one bad sector.
• DO NOT create a bootable USB/CD, it'll get stuck for some reason. What I did was to build my old Pentium E2160 and put a SATA HDD I had laying somewhere with Windows 7 x86 in it, installed HDD Regenerator for Windows, hooked up the 545 MB HDD to the IDE interface and ran it through there, 40 bad sectors were found, all have been properly fixed and recovered.

From the experience I gained these last 3/4 days working on getting this thing fully running, I noticed that if some sectors are bad, one of the biggest files in the HDD, the swapfile, will be really prone to corruption, and that might cause you to believe that the registry or that your Windows 95 installation itself is corrupted, which isn't real. To fix this issue, I booted to the Command prompt only selection and removed the swapfile. Don't worry, it'll be regenerated, you can use the following command:

1del C:\Windows\WIN386.SWP

Thumbs up to everyone who tried to give me a hand! 😀

That seems unnecessarily convoluted.

I would have assembled the 386, making sure I had a CD-ROM drive plugged in somewhere the drivers will find it (probably slave to hard drive master), then:

a) Put my windows 95 floppy boot disk in drive A and boot from it.
b) Boot to command prompt with CD-ROM support.
c) use DOS FDISK to partition drive as I see fit.
d) reboot using the boot disk and run format off the CD to format the C drive with system files.
e) Copy the WIN95 from the CD to the hard drive.
f) Start Windows Setup from the hard drive, then continue setup as per normal.

But thumbs up away, good job on getting it going 😀

canthearu wrote:

That seems unnecessarily convoluted. […]
Show full quote

That seems unnecessarily convoluted.

I would have assembled the 386, making sure I had a CD-ROM drive plugged in somewhere the drivers will find it (probably slave to hard drive master), then:

a) Put my windows 95 floppy boot disk in drive A and boot from it.
b) Boot to command prompt with CD-ROM support.
c) use DOS FDISK to partition drive as I see fit.
d) reboot using the boot disk and run format off the CD to format the C drive with system files.
e) Copy the WIN95 from the CD to the hard drive.
f) Start Windows Setup from the hard drive, then continue setup as per normal.

But thumbs up away, good job on getting it going 😀

Surely I could do it with a floppy disk in a lot easier way, but as I said (or guess I said, don't remember very well 🤣), I couldn't find any working floppy drive around. Eventually, I found one yesterday and a box of brand new Datsun 3.5" floppies, though all of them were scratched on their first sectors. 🙁 Guess I put them in my broken floppy drive as a child, one of them worked, but it broke a couple of seconds later. BTW, floppies boxes aren't under 7 U$D in my country, which is just too expensive for 10 floppies from an unknown brand.

That's it, I'll keep looking for floppies around my house, there must be one or two in a decent state, I'm still needing one cause I can't emulate a floppy drive in FreeDOS (I could do it in MS-DOS) and I'm quite lazy to hook everything back into the Pentium II just to get that emulated floppy to install the audio driver for my OPTi soundcard.

Thanks for the thumbs up and cheers! 😀