Ok so I have an old laptop with only a floppy drive. It came with windows 95 on it but suffered from some terrible BSODs that I could not resolve. I figured I would just download some windows 95 install disks and reformat it, but apparently those disks were a special type and format that held more than 1.4mb. All the floppies I have are incapable of being formatted that way.Is there any other way to make windows 95 install disks that fit onto standard disks? Or is there some way I can split these into smaller files and then copy them all onto the hd and then join them up again and install it that way?I currently have windows 3.11 installed. @Tommy: When writing a sector on a disk, there's a little bit of uncertainty in where the new data will be placed. A 1.44MB disk leaves a little extra space between sectors so that even if a sector runs a little 'long' it won't hit the start of the next sector.
If 21 sectors are written as fast as possible, each sector will be guaranteed to finish before the next one starts, and all 21 can complete before the disk rotates far enough to reach the first sector again. An attempt to write any sector but the last, however, may corrupt the next sector.–Jun 7 '18 at 21:20. These are disks, storing 1.68 MB of data instead of the usual 1.44 MB (on high-density 3.5” disks).There are a couple of strategies you can use:.You can create floppies with the original contents of the installation disks. If you’re running Windows, is supposed to be able to write such images to floppies. Under Linux, you can format DMF disks using fdformat and write the images directly.You can copy the images’ contents to a directory ( W95INST for example) on the laptop’s hard drive, if you have some other way of copying files there, and then run SETUP from the hard drive. To copy the files, you could for example use a serial or parallel cable with INTERSRV and INTERLNK under DOS, or extract the drive from the laptop and connect it to another system. Using floppies to do this is also possible but will be a bit more involved since most of the files on the installation disks are larger than standard floppies, so you’ll need to split them.
As Stephen Kitt mentioned, if you have enough floppies, you can make a ZIP file of the installation directory and span it over several floppies. This way you can use whatever disks you happen to have hanging around and don't have to worry if they contain bad sectors as much (those disks simply will hold slightly less.) As the CAB files are already compressed, don't worry too much about compression levels: the difference between level 0 and level 9 will be very small.
An additional benefit is that PKUNZIP will tell you if there are errors in the archive, so you don't end up with corrupted installation files on the other end.However, as you mentioned getting blue screen errors previously, I would look into why you got the the errors in the first place before installing Windows 95, as they could be indicative of hardware issues. I think you have a bigger problem here.The expected lifespan of computers is around 5 years. Parts may be designed to last 10 years or so. Your laptop though must be at least 25 years old. I'm frankly amazed that it works at all.Do you have all the data transferred off the hard drive?
If not, do it now! Hopefully you can connect the hard drive to your regular PC, or you can back up files to floppies between BSODs. Either way, get that data somewhere else, because your entire laptop and all its data could die permanently at any time.And also think about how much you value your time.
Windows 95 Floppy Disk Download
A new netbook costs peanuts, and even a moderate-spec laptop isn't that expensive. You could spend days fighting this and never have it working, because it's too far gone; or you could just buy another PC.
If you're trying to get it working out of curiosity, I suggest you try Ubuntu Linux instead as an extra layer of curiosity, and also because you can get that freely, unlike Windows.
Windows 95 Floppy Disk Download
Windows 95 RTMWindows 95 offered, at long last, a well designed document-oriented desktop shell that worked much like the 1984 Macintosh Finder. It also included a new way of finding installed applications through a 'Start' menu.
And it included the same networking abilities as Windows for Workgroups.It integrated the ability to run 32-bit applications similar to or with Win32s. It no longer ran on a separate DOS product. But Windows 95 was not a pure '32-bit' OS: It was still based around the framework of Windows 3.x, 2.x and 1.x. It still ran on top of DOS, but bundled its own special 'Windows 95' DOS (AKA MS-DOS 7). It could even still make use of DOS drivers. The 95 architecture was continued with.Most 95 CDs are NOT BOOTABLE. If a download does not include a boot floppy, please seeIf the listed serials below do not work for a specific release, please see theYou may also override the install type (no serial needed) by creating a file name MSBATCH.INF with the lines 'Setup', and then 'ProductType=1', placing that in the Win95 setup folder, and then running setup.