And I would like to use it to boot from when I need to play Windows 95/DOS games.
I currently have a Win XP machine and quite a few games that require Windows 95 or DOS only. I thought it would be handy to have two hard drives, one with Win 95 to play the older games that I could boot from. I thought that I could choose at the start up which one to boot from and if booting from the Win XP drive use the other as a plain old HD.
Apart from any problems I don’t see, the two I can are;
I don’t have a means of choosing to boot from one drive over the other as my setup (the screen you get when you hit “del” on start up) is password protected and I never password protected it myself.
And I don’t have a boot disc to load up the PC ready to install Win 95. I have one from an older PC, but it had of course a different cd rom.
It all depends on your motherboard. Many motherboards won’t let you boot from a USB or firewire device so that alone woule be a deal killer. You also have to find a way to get into the BIOS to see. That involves opening the case and moving a reset jumper.
Have you tried all of the backwards compatibility settings that XP offers. I don’t see a lot of people trying to build a dual-boot Winows 95 machine these days. There are usually better options.
I may have misread. I assumed you meant an external hard drive but maybe you mant an internal one. That will work but you still have to get into the BIOS. A reset jumper can kill that password for you.
I’ll let someone more knowledgeable come along and answer your boot questions, but I was reading an article in PC Gamer and they highly recommended a freeware program called “DOSBox” for playing older Win95 games under WinXP.
Easiest fix:
There are a gazillion 95 boxes out there, people will give you a complete running system for just hauling it off. Play your game on that.
Next easiest: (you can default the BIOS and get rid of the password. Need computer type and specs and which BIOS you have )
Learn to enter ‘setup’ in BIOS at the start and enable and disable each hard drive as to comply with the one you want to use.
#3:
Check to see if you have so much RAM and high powered computer parts that 95 will just die of embarrassment. If not, then what I’d do is:
Use mobile racks and before starting the computer, install the hard drive you want to use.
#4:
Set up a dual boot system, I know guys do that with the “L” systems but I think they do that on a partitioned hard drive, not dual ones.
Some one will be along to explain how to do dat.
I would just grab an old ‘give away computer system’ and make it my play station.
It can be done. It is very easy to do IF you install 95 first, then when you install XP you select a new intsallation instead of an upgrade. If you do it this way, then XP will automatically set up its boot loader with an option for windows 95 and another option for XP.
Installing 95 after you’ve already installed XP gets a lot more complicated, because 95 wants to install its own boot loader which will wipe out XP’s boot loader. There used to be utilities available specifically for multiple booting that would basically save the boot sector somewhere safe, allow you to install your new OS, then would save the new boot sector somewhere safe also. Then the utility installs its own boot loader which allows you to select which boot loader you want to use. If you don’t install 95 first, you may have to use this type of boot scheme.
I personally would recommend using 98 instead of 95. I used to have a machine set up to dual boot 98 and XP, so it definately can be done. Mine were both set up as different partitions on the same hard drive, so technically you don’t even need another hard drive either.
I know that I tried every compatibility setting I could find, and didn’t have much luck. For a long time, I dual booted XP/98. Now I have two seperate machines set up.
You don’t hear about a lot of people dual booting, because a lot of people only run the latest games and do typical internet stuff which XP does better anyway. People (like me) who think older games are just as enjoyable as they were when you bought them or (also like me) happen to have old programs that they still find useful are enough of a minority that Microsoft can basically give us the middle finger and say we don’t matter and get away with it.
The DOS emulators out there are also getting better, though they still won’t run all programs.
I don’t have that much room in my rented accommodation, so one PC would work best for me.
On another older computer I tried partitioning and the whole thing just went up in my face so I don’t have much faith in it, a hardware option seemed least damaging to me.
My games are a mixture of Win 95 only and DOS games, is there a software fix for them all? Even to play Xwing or TIE fighter on the machine would be good, they don’t even install.
I’ll try and get the details of the motherboard when I get a chance.
Your best bet would be with a 3rd party boot manager, as engineer_comp_geek suggested. System Commander is good, as is the boot manager in Acronis Disk Director.
You could also create a DOS / 95 virtual machine using the free VMWare Server and play on that, if you have enough memory.
This is a simple problem to fix. Try asking google how you might “reset bios password.” One of the first links I found explains removing the battery in your case or using a motherboard jumper to reset the BIOS settings. Make sure you realize that resetting the BIOS means you will lose not just the password but all your previous BIOS settings.
For running DOS programs (meaning DOS, Win3x and Win9x) I would suggest you first try Dosbox as suggested by Fear the Turtle. If it works it will be the simplest solution.
WinXP is capable of giving you a menu choice at startup between 95 and XP. The age old idea of having multiple operating systems available is generally the area of dual booting – although there is nothing that limits you to just two. Dual booting is the elegant solution but requires you to read up on NTLDR and Bootcfg (see WinXP help and microsoft.com for more details).
If you have already installed your new second hard drive then the inelegant solution is to disconnect your original hard drive while leaving the second in its spot as primary slave and just install win95 on the second drive. Now you can reconnect your original hard drive and switch between the two in BIOS setup.
I was also going to suggest System Commander. I haven’t used it in a few years but back in the late 90’s I was working on a project that was developed on the OS/2 platform, and I used it quite a bit to boot back and forth between OS/2 and Windows.
Acronis Disk Director seems to save some hassle, how would I get Win95 installed though in the first place. My old boot disc doesn’t seem to work for Win95.
Per Shagnasty’s point re the BIOS if you can find the model # of your PC, or if it was assembled from parts, the model # of you motherboard, you can often find the motherboard manual online with jumper diagrams. Sometimes the jumper functions are printed on the board itself close ot the jumper blocks. Moving the BIOS jumper from one set of pins to another will generally reset the BIOS password. On some really old systems just removing the BIOS/Clock battery will do this, but on most Win 95 circa Motherboards the BIOS info is also backed up by a capacitor so removing the clock battery does nothing unless the system is powered down for a very long period of time.
You want to go the DOSBox route. Even if you dual-boot, tour PC is too fast to run many of the old games that weren’t programmed to deal with vastly faster processors.
