At the bottom the POST Screen, the computer displays a special string. Often when you look for it you get the motherboard name ... But with what you say (no marks except "made in china"), I'm not sure if you really want to know what mobo it is as it may be a PCChips board ...

To instal windows 95 (and even some versions of 98 apparently), you NEED a boot floppy because those weren't bootable CDs (except for later win98 versions and win98SE and ME). Every win 95 came with a boot floppy that started up MS-DOS 7 with drivers for CD drives. Next you can go on the CD and start the installation 😀

I would feel nervous about doing that, since Windows 95 would then be forced to get rid of all the drivers it had installed the first time, and replace them - not necessarily a bad thing, but also not a very good idea with 95's notoriously unstable driver system.

What you should do is find a Windows 95 installation boot floppy, which you can then use to make the system boot from CD. (edit: Deksor beat me to it 😀 )

Windows 9x was really, really bad about reinstalling drivers automatically when changing hardware. You can generally only get away with it with very minor hardware changes.

As previously mentioned.. boot disk (not disc).

...or you can always get original Windows 95 release (RTM) on floppies! Just look for a version remade for 1.44MB disks — it should fit on 17 or 18 floppies. 😀

Just in case you can't get a boot disk to work for some reason.

I've done a Windows 95 OSR1 install from floppy... it's not fun but it's not as bad as you'd think, and OSR1 doesn't have the Active Desktop "enhancements". The original Shell for Win95 would probably be quite a bit faster on a 486.

That said, one more vote for a boot floppy - that would definitely let you boot the machine and install from CD.

Or it might be done another way too : put the HDD in a newer machine just like you thought before, format it using "FORMAT [drive letter]: /S" to make the HDD bootable and then copy the files from the win95 CD to whatever directory you want on the HDD. Next put the HDD back in the 486, turn it on. It should boot to DOS 7.x and then start the installation from the directory where you did put the win95 installation files.

But that is if you don't own a CD drive/floppy drive or that it is painfully slow or that the drivers found on the win95 boot floppy can't detect the CD drive that you're using or that you're using a burned CD that can't be read by the old CD drive, otherwise, using the boot floppy and the original CD should be perfectly fine

Also, if you're crazy like me, you could install it without using any physical media with network booting 🤣 but that's just me (and you'll probably need a PCI NIC since netbooting with an ISA card seems really really hard because there is so little informations on how to do it ... All I know is that booting a computer with an ISA card means that it will be booted up with RPL ... but I never understood how to configure my server in order to make it work 😢 Maybe one day I'll find out how ... However with a PCI network card, PXE works flawlessly, installing 98SE on a Pentium 2 that way is so cool and so practical 😁 You don't fear to loose your CD anymore)

Deksor wrote:

But that is if you don't own a CD drive/floppy drive or that it is painfully slow or that the drivers found on the win95 boot floppy can't detect the CD drive that you're using or that you're using a burned CD that can't be read by the old CD drive, otherwise, using the boot floppy and the original CD should be perfectly fine
)

well one issue is that the computer doesn't seem to work with the cd rom drive that it has. The cd rom drive is a creative sound blaster and I don't know if it needs to be connected to a soundblaster card to work or not. I also don't know if the machine (ide/floppy expansion card) supports cd rom drives or not

The 3.5" floppy drive does work and does boot , however moving a single floppy back and forth 18 times is just going to be far too tedious. So I'll see if I can try your drive method.

When I did the floppy install of OSR1, I just used two floppies. While one was installing I wrote the next image on my laptop via a USB floppy drive. Worked pretty well and didn't take that much longer than a CD install, just needed the space to have the PC and the laptop side-by-side.

Take a look at how the CD drive is connected, but as a general rule, you can use IDE CD drives in 486 machines. You might be able to use a SATA CD with a SATA-PATA adapter card: I have one 486 board that likes that, and another that doesn't. Both of them like another real IDE CD-RW that I have, though (a newer one). Also, if your IO controller *does* have SCSI on it - it probably doesn't, but if you have one of the rare ones that does - you could use a SCSI CD-ROM too. Or you could add a SCSI card, but now you're really going down the rabbit hole.

Another thing you can do, is to put the disk in a newer machine, format /s it (or format then sys it), then copy the contents of the Win95 boot CD into a directory on the hard drive, then run the installation from there. Takes a lot of space, but if the disk is big enough, it can work.

A final option if you can get the CD working but you don't want to faff around with floppies, you can use a tool called Smart Boot Manager, that will allow *most* machines to boot from CD even if the BIOS can't do that.

You can go by this checklist, wich is working for Win98/ME too:

- Get the harddrive partitioned, using "FORMAT C: /S", using MS-Dos installation disk 1.
- Create a directory called "C:\INSTALL\WIN95"
- Boot the machine with a floppy bootdisk that has cdrom drivers on it.
- Copy the content of the Win95 directory on the Win95 install disk, to the directory on the harddrive.
- Reboot the machine without any floppy or cd bootdisk.
- Go to the Win95 install files directory on the harddrive.
- Start the installation from there. (INSTALL.EXE or SETUP.EXE)

ok i just ended up using the floppy disk method. sure did take a long time but ended up working out.

I ended up trying out some condensed youtube video on it and it does pretty well for a 486 with no mpeg acceleration.