Dancing the Windows 95 Shuffle

I am writing all this before I go to the Spring COMDEX show in Chicago (June 1-6). I know that it will not be as exciting as the Fall COMDEX, which is held in Las Vegas. What could Chicago have to offer that Las Vegas doesn't have in triplicate? Hopefully I will get some new goodies and line up a few exciting general meeting presentations and then report in future Ramblings on all the new goodies that I encountered.

Plug and Unplug and Fiddle and Plug and Play

Recently I had an interesting time installing Windows 95 on my Pentium 133. It has a Sound Blaster 16 board and a SMC Ethernet board. All of this was working great under DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. The Sound Blaster was set to IRQ 5 and the SMC Ethernet board was set to IRQ 2. So I figured that it would be a piece of cake to upgrade to Windows 95.

Generally, you have the best luck in upgrading if you upgrade with everything running normally. I found out that the network card would not work using IRQ 2 under Windows 95. It could not be set to IRQ 10, which would be available under Windows 95. That Sound Blaster board had a rough time letting loose of IRQ 5 and resetting up to IRQ 10, but I did it. I had to uninstall Windows 95, which is a piece of cake if you took all the defaults when you upgraded.

I then removed the Ethernet card and ran the Sound Blaster's diagnostics to set its IRQ to 10. This required a lot of files to get changed so I finally just deleted all the Sound Blaster files to make it easier.

The Sound Blaster was now set to IRQ 10 and I then re-installed the SMC Ethernet board. I ran the SMC Ethernet card setup program, EZstart, and set its IRQ to 5. Then I changed the NET.CFG and the .INI files in Windows. I was back in operation under DOS and Windows 3.1.

Now the upgrade went like a dream. It always takes about 45 minutes or so but still everything works. I don't know why the Ethernet board did not want to work on IRQ 10 but that's what the setup said. The main reason for the uninstall of Windows 95 was that the diagnostic setup program for the sound card would not let me set its IRQ to 10 when Windows 95 was running. The same thing with my Ethernet board. I tried all kinds of tricks but the easiest was to uninstall Windows 95 and get back to regular Windows 3.1. Can't argue with success!

While I am discussing Windows 95, let me give you a couple of World Wide Web sites that are invaluable in picking up the latest versions of goodies for Windows 95:
http://www.windows95.com and http://www.shareware.com. Both are
great.

How to Replace a Hard Drive

Now onto another interesting dilemma that I ran into. I had to replace the hard disk that was in a system that had Windows 95 installed. It started to have problems with bad places on the hard disk and I did not want to wait until critical mass was reached. It is normally not an easy job to do all this, without a lot of aggravation. This is what I ended up doing, remembering that Windows 95 is such a completely different animal from DOS and Windows 3.1.

Situation: A 2-gigabyte SCSI II hard disk partitioned into 4
500-megabyte drives -- C (primary) and D, E, and F as drives in an extended DOS partition.

Caution: The following procedure will only work if you have 12
megabytes of RAM or more. No one should be running Windows 95 with less than 12 megabytes of RAM anyway, unless he enjoys watching grass grow. This caution is because Windows 95 will not allow you to disable the swap file (step 7) if you have less than 12 megabytes of RAM.

1. Formatted a bootable floppy with the Windows 95 format command. Copied FDISK.EXE & FORMAT.COM to this disk. You can use the Explorer or the DOS prompt. Remember to use the FDISK and FORMAT from the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND subdirectory even though your older DOS versions should have been removed when Windows 95 installed the new DOS 7.0 utility files.

I then removed the old SCSI drive completely. Then I rebooted with this new Windows 95 system formatted floppy disk.

2. I ran FDISK and partitioned the new disk with the same size and partitions as the old one. I could have installed a larger drive but 2 gigabytes is about the right size. Then I formatted the C: drive with the /S option to install the system files and make it bootable. The other 3 500-megabyte drives in the extended partition were formatted as the D, E, and F drives.

3. The original disk was re-installed with its SCSI ID set to 0. This booted the system from the original hard disk. Then I installed this new replacement SCSI drive and assigned it to SCSI ID 1. (IDE would be old=Master, new=Slave).

4. Now when the computer re-booted. The first drive was the original C and the new drive's primary partition was drive D.

5. The drive letter assignments before and after adding the new hard disk:

If you had a batch file for DOS 6.+:

XCOPY C:\ G: /M /S
XCOPY D:\ H: /M /S
XCOPY E:\ I: /M /S
XCOPY F:\ J: /M /S

Hard disk
#1 #2

C G
D H
E I
F J

7. Go to Control Panel | System | Performance | Virtual memory. Click on Disable Virtual Memory and then reboot. This disables the Windows 95 swap file and allows you to copy all the Windows 95 files properly.

There sure are lots and lots of hidden, read-only, system attribute files under Windows 95. When the system comes back up after you have rebooted, type these lines one at a time from the Start | Run selection.

xcopy c:\*.* /e /h /k /r d:
xcopy e:\*.* /e /h /k /r h:
xcopy f:\*.* /e /h /k /r i:
xcopy g:\*.* /e /h /k /r j:

/e = Copy directories and sub directories, including empty ones /h = Copy hidden and system files
/k = Copy attributes of all the files
/r = Overwrite read-only files

8. When you're finished, properly shut the system down and remove the original hard disk. Set the new hard disk as the master drive or SCSI ID=0.

9. Place the bootable Windows 95 diskette, which you created earlier, into the A drive. When you reboot the system, you will have to execute the FDISK command from the A drive to make the new C drive primary partition to be the active partition.

10. After making C: the active partition, re-boot the computer without a floppy in the A: drive.

You might have to run the Windows SETUP.EXE program again as a last resort, for sometimes Windows 95 gets a bit confused with all this file movement. A good Windows 95 tape backup system would be great about this time, but I haven't seen one yet that I trust. Other backup systems do not back up the long file names.

One comment: The XCOPY command really executes the XCOPY32.EXE
program so that all your long file names are preserved. The older DOS versions of XCOPY.EXE would not do this.

I hope that all this will help someone else conduct a smooth transfer of Windows 95 to a new hard disk. The alternate method is to re-install completely.

Rich Schinnell is the past president of CPCUG and the present director of programs. He is retired from the USN, retired from Vitro Corporation, and now does a bit of consulting on the side. He has been one of the cadre of volunteers for CPCUG since its founding back in 1982. He can be reached at (301) 949-9292 in the evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. or by e-mail at
schinnel@cpcug.org. Like most techies, he has a home page, located at http://www.cpcug.org/user/ schinnel.

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