Hi,
Is it possible to make a partition that 95 is compatible with on a modern hard drive? i.e. >500 GB?
I have a legit copy of 95 lying around but I need a hard drive partition smaller than 2 GB. I tried with fdisk a while ago on an old 40 GB but no luck. Does anyone have any insight into this that I am lacking? I am thinking of getting an IDE/SATA adapter with it if that is important.
Did your hard drive come with a floppy with partitioning software? That's important.
Also I wouldn't try risking Windows 9x on anything bigger than 112gb. There ARE some third-party drivers out there that supposedly fix this, but... risk.
Does the BIOS even support a drive that large?
I have used PCI SATA controllers and using SUPER FDISK create a 30GB partition and that works.
The other option are CF cards. They work well and are easily available in 2GB sizes.
Sounds like you are using Windows 95 original version (also known as Windows 95a or OSR1); unfortunately, it uses FAT16 file system only and does not support partitions larger than 2 GB.
If you want to create bigger partitions, you will need Windows 95b at least (also known as OSR2); it uses FAT32 file system and can handle larger partitions. There are also 2 other versions of Windows 95b: OSR2.1 (adds limited USB support) and OSR2.5 (adds Internet Explorer 4 and Active Desktop). You can also use Windows 98 or Windows 98 SE; legit copies can be found at eBay. Windows 95 original cannot be retrofitted with FAT32 - Microsoft never made any patches or updates to allow this.
Any particular reason why you want to use Windows 95?
Ooohh, the pain......
The only reason that I want to use 95 is that I already have a copy.
I read about people using seatools to make a HDD smaller but it seems like people only make it 32 GB. Is there a similar way to make the drive less than 2 GB with the correct formatting?
If this isnt possible I will just go with 98. Like I said, I just want 95 because I already have it.
32GB will be enough for the BIOS to fully recognise the HDD. Then just create a 2GB partition.
Perfect thanks I'll give that a try
wrote:I am thinking of getting an IDE/SATA adapter with it if that is important.
The 500GB drive in the discussion is SATA? Windows 95 probably won't have drivers for that. Or for anything else in your system, if your motherboard is new enough to support SATA onboard. If it is a PCI card, it will probably be the same situation where the oldest supported Windows driver is for 98SE or 2000.
wrote:If this isnt possible I will just go with 98. Like I said, I just want 95 because I already have it.
If you just need an operating system for the random hardware you have, why not try a flavor of Linux? Otherwise if your goal is to run a machine with Windows 95 either find older hardware (1994-2000) or run a VM.
wrote:wrote:I am thinking of getting an IDE/SATA adapter with it if that is important.
The 500GB drive in the discussion is SATA? Windows 95 probably won't have drivers for that. Or for anything else in your system, if your motherboard is new enough to support SATA onboard. If it is a PCI card, it will probably be the same situation where the oldest supported Windows driver is for 98SE or 2000.
You don't need drivers in Win95/98 if the card have a BIOS and you're not running RAID setup. I've installed win95 myself on a SATA PCI card. No need to install drivers for the card.
A storage controller always needs a driver, so I'm looking into what makes your scenario true. If I research something ubiquitous, like the SIL3114, the driver support officially starts at Win98SE. It looks like it bridges from the SATA interface and situates itself in Windows as a Bus Master IDE Controller--which Intel and VIA both have drivers for in Win95. The controller version on this is v1.0, so you cannot access SMART data. Also since it is no longer a true SATA interface, NCQ cannot be used. In a Windows 95 system none of this matters because the drive will already mechanically outperform anything from that era.
