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Why can't I install Win95?

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First post, by videogamer555

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I don't expect Win95 to run properly on Dosbox, after it's installed, but I at least expect the installer to perform the installation. However, the installer keeps saying "Windows Setup requires 7340032 bytes available on your C: drive.". But there's a problem with that. First, my HDD has far more space than that. Second, I'm using the correct mount command to tell Dosbox to report exactly 1GB of HDD free space to any program that asks for HDD free space,
(that command being "mount C C -freespace 1024").

Please tell me why it's not working. And more specifically, please tell me why the Win95 installer keeps reporting the same false claim that there's not enough HDD space, even though I've done everything possible to avoid that error.

Reply 1 of 4, by DosFreak

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Windows 9x isn't supported in DOSBox as a guest but if you wish to continue down this path for some reason then you need to mount a hard drive image just like any other emulation or virtualization software.

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Reply 2 of 4, by videogamer555

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DosFreak wrote on 2022-01-09, 07:31:

Windows 9x isn't supported in DOSBox as a guest but if you wish to continue down this path for some reason then you need to mount a hard drive image just like any other emulation or virtualization software.

So the emulated drive that corresponds to a host system folder, isn't going to work? That's too bad.

Reply 4 of 4, by Jo22

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videogamer555 wrote on 2022-01-09, 08:09:
DosFreak wrote on 2022-01-09, 07:31:

Windows 9x isn't supported in DOSBox as a guest but if you wish to continue down this path for some reason then you need to mount a hard drive image just like any other emulation or virtualization software.

So the emulated drive that corresponds to a host system folder, isn't going to work? That's too bad.

No, it isn't going work, sadly. One of the reasons:
Win 95 tries to copy its own DOS, MS-DOS 7.x, to drive C:.
That doesn't work with the virtual file system.
For example, the MBR/boot sector cannot be altered, because there is none.

DOSBox uses its own implementation of DOS, which is similar to MS-DOS 5 and which is fine for Windows 3.x, but not Windows 9x.

MS-DOS 7 introduced a lot of Windows specific stuff, undocumented features, FAT32 related things etc.

If you're using a blank image file, you can install Win95 into it.
Is hit and miss, though. Some releases of Win 95 work better than the other (there used to be Win95 A/B/C or different OSRs).

Tools like BXIMAGE from QEMU or BOCHS can make such raw images.

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