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Please note also - THIS BLOG ENDS HERE WITH THE LAST ENTRY FROM NOVEMBER 9th 2021.

I have prepared a new blog with wordpress at https://vintagecomputing.info !!!

Thank you.

I rebuild a 486 PC with some spare parts, and because it had 32MB RAM, I thought it would be a good idea to install Windows 95... YES, this first rolling stones ("start me up") driven meanwhile ancient operating system.
Unfortunately I didn't have an IDE CD-ROM yet available for it, so I decided to recreate the floppy disks for installing Windows 95 from my Windows 95 CD-ROM (using my modern PC).
This was not so easy ... while googling for it, I found a lot of hints about Windows 95B (OSR2) installation, also describing how and what to copy onto the floppy disks, but hey, Windows 95 (first edition, 4.00.950) differs here totally !
Infos I found about a "WIN95_02.CAB" file were misleading - there is not such a file for the first edition. There is also no need to format floppy disks in DMF format here.
But it's not difficult - the bootdisk has to have at least the OEMSETUP.* files,
and the first installation floppy disk (No. 1) must include these files:
DELTEMP.COM, DOSSETUP.BIN, EXTRACT.EXE, MINI.CAB, MSBATCH.INF, PRECOPY1.CAB,
README.TXT, SAVE32.COM, SCANDISK.EXE, SCANDISK.PIF, SCANPROG.EXE, SCANREG.EXE,
SETUP.EXE, SETUP.TXT, SMARTDRV.EXE, WB16OFF.EXE, WINSETUP.BIN, XMSMMGR.EXE
The second installation Disk contains only PRECOPY2.CAB, and the 3rd one just PRECOPY3.CAB and WIN95_03.CAB. All subsequent floppies contain a WIN95_XX.CAB file, while XX is the number of the disk, starting with No. 04 up to No. 22. Btw. the german version of Windows 95 has an INFO.TXT file instead of README.TXT ;-)
At least 30 minutes later, the base installation was finished.

What I didn't knew before - the video card was an ET3000 and Windows 95 did not recognized this, but you can surprisingly install drivers also from Windows 3.1 (there were no Windows 95 driver for the Tseng ET3000). Now I was even able to set 256 colors (instead of the default 16 colors).

Next project for me: Installing the first Diablo game (from Blizzard)... stay tuned.