Can I dual boot WXP & W95?

[badgolferman]

I am posting this question to these two newsgroups for hardware related
questions related to WXP and W95. The Windows 95 newsgroups seem to be
dead understandably.

I have a rack-mounted PC with WXP pre-loaded on it. The motherboard
has Extended ISA slots and PCI slots. The
processor/memory/video/external connections are actually on an
expansion card that plugs into the motherboard. There are USB, PS2,
serial, parallel ports all connected to the processor board. The hard
drive is serial ATA and the CD-ROM is IDE.

This is what I need to do and need some guidance as to whether it can
be done.

I want to make this machine a dual-boot system with WXP/W95. I need to
use the extended IDE slots with the W95 installation and the PCI slots
with the WXP installation. The reason I need a W95 installation is the
application I must use is written for W95 and queries the bus
architecture looking for this ISA expansion board and will not work
with WXP. I also need WXP because it will perform the same function
but with the application written for WXP only. So far I have not been
able to make WXP recognize the PS2 mouse or keyboard when they are
plugged in. I can use the keyboard to access the BIOS and navigate
around although it's not as responsive as it should be.

Here are some basic questions:

1. Can I partition the S-ATA drive without destroying the current WXP
installation?

2. Can I install and run W95 from the partitioned S-ATA drive?

3. Can W95 use the onboard video port or even a separate PCI video
card?

4. How do I get both OSes to use the same keyboard and mouse? I
can't remember if W95 supports PS2 and am rather certain it doesn't
support USB.

5 Am I better off installing a secondary IDE hard drive for W95 and
how would I make it boot from that drive?

This endeavour is becoming more complicated as I delve into it but am
hopeful it can be accomplished. Thanks for any feedback and any
gotchas.

 

[badgolferman]

Not likely you'll ever find win95 SATA drivers...


I'd disconnect your XP drive and install win95 on an ide drive
and see if you can get it to work that way,

If you get win95 installed ok
then hook up your SATA drive and you will need to boot to XP and
modify the boot loader


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022


Though that should work, if it does not...
you may be able to select the boot drive in the bios

I have followed your suggestion and installed another drive. It is a
100 GB drive but I partitioned it to 2 GB and formatted to FAT16. I
get WIN95 installed but it won't boot. It complains that there is
insufficient memory and to remove unnnecessary entries from
autoexec.bat, config.sys files. The computer has at least 4 GB RAM and
there are no autoexec, config files in the root directory. I feel
rather certain WIN95 can't handle that amount of RAM and isn't mapping
it correctly, hence the error message. Any suggestions?

 

[Sjouke Burry]

I have followed your suggestion and installed another drive. It is a
100 GB drive but I partitioned it to 2 GB and formatted to FAT16. I
get WIN95 installed but it won't boot. It complains that there is
insufficient memory and to remove unnnecessary entries from
autoexec.bat, config.sys files. The computer has at least 4 GB RAM and
there are no autoexec, config files in the root directory. I feel
rather certain WIN95 can't handle that amount of RAM and isn't mapping
it correctly, hence the error message. Any suggestions?

Open a sizeable ramdisk in config.sys,leaving 500mb to win95.
That should do it.
If not,there is also something in the system.ini?? file needing
editing, but I cant remember what it is, about memorysize/limit.

 

[badgolferman]

Open a sizeable ramdisk in config.sys,leaving 500mb to win95.
That should do it.
If not,there is also something in the system.ini?? file needing
editing, but I cant remember what it is, about memorysize/limit.

I do not have a config.sys or autoexec.bat. Do you think I should
create them?

I found a MS KB article instructing me to add the line
MaxPhysPage=20000 in the [386enh] section of the system.ini which I did
but all that did was set me back even further with a Windows Protection
Error now.

 

[Sjouke Burry]

Open a sizeable ramdisk in config.sys,leaving 500mb to win95.
That should do it.
If not,there is also something in the system.ini?? file needing
editing, but I cant remember what it is, about memorysize/limit.

I do not have a config.sys or autoexec.bat. Do you think I should
create them?

I found a MS KB article instructing me to add the line
MaxPhysPage=20000 in the [386enh] section of the system.ini which I did
but all that did was set me back even further with a Windows Protection
Error now.

I would advise to use a config.sys and autoexec.bat
Use the ones at the install floppy as an example.
Let me hunt for some on my old work computer....(w89)....
config.sys:

device=c:\windows\himem.sys
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
shell=c:\command.com /p /e:1024
DEVICE=C:\windows\ANSI.SYS
device=RAMDRIVE.SYS <some parmeters here> And autoexc.bat:
@ECHO OFF
set temp=c:\tmp
set tmp=c:\tmp
md c:\tmp > nul
path c:\windows;c:\batch;c:\exe;c:\old\norton;
prompt $p$g
set comspec=c:\command.com
win

Experiment with that, dont forget the last line in autoexec.
One advantage: if you drop out of windows, you are back in DOS.
The first three lines in config.sys ensure, that you have enough
space for the icon cache, which uses the remaining dos area under win.