Windows 95. Seriously

The way you have the jumpers set in the third image. Not seeing that on the drive label. Went and checked the aforementioned Win98se system. Only three possible options on the HP drive and it's set to 'master' with that and the HDD using individual cables.

Your P2 brings back some memories. Your 256mb of memory was massive for home PCs at that time. Still have my very first system. A Dell XPS r400. 400mhz P2, 128mb RAM, and 12gb HDD. Set it aside after upgrading to socket A and have not powered it up since. It came with Win98 pre-installed and a licensed copy of Win95 - still unopened. Still remember how great it was upgrading to Win98se in '99. A back button? Sweet! :D
 
The way you have the jumpers set in the third image. Not seeing that on the drive label. Went and checked the aforementioned Win98se system. Only three possible options on the HP drive and it's set to 'master' with that and the HDD using individual cables.

Your P2 brings back some memories. Your 256mb of memory was massive for home PCs at that time. Still have my very first system. A Dell XPS r400. 400mhz P2, 128mb RAM, and 12gb HDD. Set it aside after upgrading to socket A and have not powered it up since. It came with Win98 ore-installed and a licensed copy of Win95 - still unopened. Still remember how great it was upgrading to Win98se in '99. A back button? Sweet! :D
That computer is pure gold now, Very nice keepsake!

They seam to have gotten very popular as the youtubers got popular. it might mean that interest will drop off just as quick

Anyway i realized i took the picture upside down
20200129_172344.jpg


i should just set the jumper to master i think?, in the green circle
 
. it seys for less than 32g and more than 32g. its 80g so i should go here me thinks
20200129_173411.jpg



Unless i have the greater or less than symbols wrong
 
. it seys for less than 32g and more than 32g. its 80g so i should go here me thinksView attachment 219235


Unless i have the greater or less than symbols wrong
You have the jumpers on cable select.

I recall never being able to run an optical drive and HDD on one cable. Always had enough connectors for two HDDs and an optical. Gotta remember the bandwidth.

I believe the setting you want is the one above your green circle. >32gb but not the with capa limit. Put your drive on the end of the cable.
 
You have the jumpers on cable select.

I recall never being able to run an optical drive and HDD on one cable. Always had enough connectors for two HDDs and an optical. Gotta remember the bandwidth.

I believe the setting you want is the one above your green circle. >32gb but not the with capa limit. Put your drive on the end of the cable.
thank u changing now
 
Did you also correctly set the jumper on the cd drive?

If they're both on separate IDE cables they both should be set as master on their own cables. And at the master location on the cable. And don't use the master\slave pin guide on the hard drive to set the disc drive as the pin layout may be different.
 
Last edited:
Does the CDROM have jumpers? Bent pins?
I used to forget to plug in the power connectors often
 
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Okay i got these messages. ill try newer ide cables and recheck pins etc

ill report back asap
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Yep, bios looks good. If your CDROM is set to master via jumpers , and it will be a different jumper setting, rarely were two drives the same. It may error out still, you need to hit f4 to validate the changes.
did it several times and it goes to the blinking curser and no further
 
i used the floppy boot disk to get to Fdisk. it seys its partitioning for dos and stuff. hope it goes well
 
the hard drive is used so it has a winxp C: drive and it wont let me delete. i might need a brand new hard drive
 
the hard drive is used so it has a winxp C: drive and it wont let me delete. i might need a brand new hard drive
You need a boot disk that can deal with the xp drive. It might be an NTFS format that your boot disk won't deal with.
 
okay ill try my xp boot disk
If nothing else that should let you delete the partition.
I have to say it's been over 10 years since I set up a HDD for dos/win95/98. I don't recall the minute details

Also it's fair that the drive is a dinosaur and might just be dead.
I have 5 or 6 in a basement closet. I never threw out the drives cause they're full of my personal data. Then the internet happened and well.....
 
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If nothing else that should let you delete the partition.
I have to say it's been over 10 years since I set up a HDD for dos/win95/98. I don't recall the minute details

Also it's fair that the drive is a dinosaur and might just be dead.
I have 5 or 6 in a basement closet. I never threw out the drives cause they're full of my personal data. Then the internet happened and well.....
Haha yeah the internet

The drives fine it works in my "new" pc. windows xp wont let you format the drive its running on. it wont commic suicide basicaly.

Mabye an ide to SD is in order
 
Heres a development!
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itll prolly take 168 years for it to format a 80g hard drive. iam leaving it work for the night


Thanks very much! ill update tomorow

i appreciate all the help big time
 
If nothing else that should let you delete the partition.
I have to say it's been over 10 years since I set up a HDD for dos/win95/98. I don't recall the minute details
Glad to help. The command line has a funny looking number there, I would expect that to say 80000mb, it says 41,39.65? Odd
 
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Glad to help. You should notice c: is only around 41gb so your drive is likely split into two partitions. Or it's not an 80gb drive.
or it only recognizes 41gb? its 80g and the only partition i could find was c. who knows i wouldnt know hahaha
 
or it only recognizes 41gb? its 80g and the only partition i could find was c. who knows i wouldnt know hahaha
I edited my post after a second look, I'm not sure what's going on. Hopefully the format works out
 
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the hard drive is used so it has a winxp C: drive and it wont let me delete. i might need a brand new hard drive
You need a boot disk that can deal with the xp drive. It might be an NTFS format that your boot disk won't deal with.
^^ that is it. Had exact same situation with mine doing a Win98 install. The old XP was hanging things up. Not sure if this is an option for you. What I did was put drive in an external HDD enclosure, open in Win10, and delete everything. Then things went smoothly.

[edit]
Never mind. See you have it sorted out.
 
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Glad to help. The command line has a funny looking number there, I would expect that to say 80000mb, it says 41,39.65? Odd
iam sure they only expected a max of like 5500 megs, it probably cant display the actual capacity
 
^^ that is it. Had exact same situation with mine doing a Win98 install. The old XP was hanging things up. Not sure if this is an option for you. What I did was put drive in an external HDD enclosure, open in Win10, and delete everything. Then things went smoothly.

[edit]
Never mind. See you have it sorted out.
No this is great i may have too yet!
 
^^ that is it. Had exact same situation with mine doing a Win98 install. The old XP was hanging things up. Not sure if this is an option for you. What I did was put drive in an external HDD enclosure, open in Win10, and delete everything. Then things went smoothly.

[edit]
Never mind. See you have it sorted out.
way cheaper than a new HDD
Screenshot_20200129-201828_Amazon Shopping.jpg
 
wow thanks for making me feel old! ;) its been sooooo long since ive had to do this i probably would have had to ask for help or google in silent defeat. nice job.
 
Quick way to check old HDDs. This 80gb Barracuda was in a family member's PC. Early XP install. Windows Defender found over 40 severe threats. Quite sure that system was zombified and painfully sluggish.
 

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its doing the format but this keeps coming up
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i assume its finding bad sectors on the disk.

i might try an ide to SD from amazon
 
Oh definitly, pentium 2 came out a year before win98 i think, Pentium 2s did come with win95 at a point

But to realy main line nostalgia into my veins i like windows 95, next one will be 98. i have a pentium 3 in the tickle trunk

I run Windows 2000 on my Pentium 3 Tualatin. Benchmarked it against a Pentium 4 Willamette (1.4Ghz) with identical GPU's, the Pentium 3 was faster!
 
Interesting thread. I'm not that old but apparently this one is going to make me feel that way.

So first and foremost, you're liking using Windows 95 OSR2 version C, if it has a copyright of 1998. Basically OSR2 was the first version of Windows with USB support.

What you need to know is that Windows 95 has a max drive limit of 32GB when formatted with FAT32.
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-drives-capacity-limits/5/

The reason for that jumper that says >32GB is so that you can operate the drive at full capacity, or operate the drive in compatibility mode by setting it to only display <32GB. In order for it to work with Windows 95, you want to limit the drive size to 32GB. Keep in mind an average HDD size was Windows 95 was released was around 400MB, and even 20GB HDDs we're really a thing most people had until the turn of the century.

The jumpers in either picture I saw are not set correctly at all. What you really want to do is just set the Hard drive to master, but also set it so that the drive is limited to <32GB.

Let me explain the settings first, then I'll explain where you should be putting jumpers on the drive.


The CS, SL, MA stands for:

Cable Select
SLave
MAster

In that order. Master means it's the primary drive on the chain, slave means it's the secondary drive on the chain. Cable Select is technically an option that should autodetect which one of the two positions on the chain it's in, and set it accordingly. This setting was generally garbage and most people avoided using it because it can be inconsistent. So that said the "master" position on the cable is always the very end of the cable, and the slave is the one in the middle. Technically you can flip the cable either direction, but they were made so that the longer distance between connectors was supposed to be between the motherboard and the slave. The Red stripe is to indicate which side is Pin 1.

So the simplest method it to just plug the HDD into the end port on the cable, and set it for Master. But in order to understand the diagram, you need to look at the picture. The thing on the left of the picture is supposed to represent the molex connector for power, and the thing on the right is the IDE cable. So when setting your jumpers you need to flip the drive upside down in order to match the picture in the middle. Some drives used to be nice and actually have CS, SL, MA engraved on the bottom, but that's probably not the case on your drive.

Howtojumper.jpg





Notice how I flipped the drive upside down so it matches the label? The column you want to focus on is the one in green. The thing I'm not entirely sure on is the descriptions of capacities. The first of the 3 seems like it would just be normal operation for the drive, but it's possible it did have that other jumper off to the side for a larger drive like this one. The center one would be the correct option for using in a newer pc, but in your case you want to limit drive capacity. I THINK that the 3rd option is what would do that, take a >32GB drive and cap it at 32GB. 95 won't handle more than this, so you don't want to go over 32GB. The easiest way to tell you have it right is plug it into a newer pc, and then see if it's limited in size.

Old Windows was also notoriously bad at formatting anything that already had data on it, and it would not like to do it if it couldn't recognize the partition on it. (Like EXT3 or NTFS) What you should do is completely remove all partitions from the drive on another pc, so the drive is blank. Then boot with your floppy disk, and partition and format the drive as FAT32.


The screen you're seeing about not reading C is fairly common when you attempt to format the disk with other utilities. Even Windows XP can sometimes make incompatible drives that Windows 95 couldn't read. (XP can format up to 137GB in FAT32 without service packs, I think you can hit the 2TB FAT32 limit otherwise) If a boot disk and fdisk doesn't work, then something probably isn't configured correctly. You need to fdisk, create 1 primary partition, set the partition as active, then run a format C: so the drive is actually formatted.


The funny thing about this thread is everyone's nostalga about this stuff. It sounds cool and it would have been neat to keep the stuff laying around, right up until you remember that Windows 95 generally doesn't boot without a boot disk, and a period correct PC (Not a Pentium 2) definitely wasn't booting off a CD. Be glad the system you have has auto detect, because most 486 / 33 mhz machines you'd have to set the CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors) manually in the bios from the data that was on the label. (If you were lucky for it to have that. Otherwise you'd have to try to hunt down that information or stick the drive into another pc that could detect it for you) Back in the 286 days that 40 pin cable wasn't keyed, striped, or had the missing pin blocked out. It was easy to plug the cable in wrong because you didn't know which direction it should be on the drive. I had to drill out that block from newer cables to use on older drives that still had all 40 pins.

The other note about cables, I think you have a genuine 40 pin / wire cable. That meant a maximum of ATA/33 bus interface, or 33MBps. I don't believe that plugging a CD rom drive into that same cable would have an affect on your hard drive, because both can probably operate at the ATA/33 spec. Where you ran into issues was using ATA/66, 100, or 133. You needed both an 80 wire cable and all devices on the chain had to run at the same top speed in order for it to operate at that speed. So an ATA/33 CD Rom drive chained to an ATA/100 HDD would mean the HDD would operate at ATA/33. On your board it's likely all a moot point because the board interface is probably only ATA/33.



One side note, I wouldn't necessarily assume the disk has bad sectors, but because it's >32GB there might be weird issues going on with it's ability to access sectors. I'd probably try limiting the disk first and see if that makes those issues go away. If it works as is great, but if you're seeing errors it might be a compatibility issue and not necessarily an issue on the drive.
 
Better question, who still has a functional floppy drive?

In your computer, or on the shelf? I have a few in machines, but they aren't hooked up at the moment. It's more of a I don't have the face plate to block the hole so the drive can stay in the case. I have a working 3.5 and 5.25" if I really needed them, but it would probably take more time to find a disk that still worked than a drive.
 
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