[RESOLVED] Upgrade Win95a to Win95b(need 2gig plus)

[garyhall]

I have a Win95 version "a" and a 2 gig drive and want to copy it to a WDC 6.4 gig drive. Eventually the 6.4 drive will be placed it in an ATX 350MHz box. I understand there is a OSR service pack ?? available that will upgrade a version "A" to a version "B".

If that isn't possible do I (can I) have to upgrade to Win98.

[Darren Wilson]

you will need to upgrade before you clone the drive , especially if you want to use a FAT32 partition. Esiest way is to get hold of an OEM OSR2.1 or higher and rename the win.com file on your system to win.bak before you run the setup program. You should now have n problems installing the FULL version over another FULL version.

[garyhall]

Darren, thanks for your answer. You said: "Esiest way is to get hold of an OEM OSR2.1 or higher."

I wish I was a bit more knowledgeable of some terms. Are you talking about OEM Win95??? I have that, but I am unfamilar with OSR2.1.

Thanks. Gary

[This message has been edited by garyhall (edited April 09, 1999).]

[THX]

OSR 2 is the same thing as win 95 B. OSR stands for OEM Service Release.

I would highly suggest upgrading to Win 98 instead of trying to upgrade to OSR 2. Win 98 includes a utility that will convert your drive to FAT 32.

Very cool.

[stevet]

You won't have to convert the existing data if you want to make the new drive into one FAT32 partition. If a B-version (OSR2) or newer CD is available, upgrade by renaming win.com (like Darren suggested) then running setup. Then connect the new drive to the system and boot to your B-version startup disk. Run fdisk and answer "Y" to the question on whether you want to enable large disk suppot. Create your primary partition, then reboot and format. Now you can clone your old FAT16 Win95B hard drive to your new FAT32 drive. The best way to do this is to have both hard drives installed and start up into Win95 from the old drive. Go to start, then run. If your new drive is drive d:, type:

xcopy c:\*.* /h/e/r/c/k d:

After xcopy finishes, shut down your system, swap the hard drives so the new drive becomes drive c:, and start your system. If the new drive fails to start Win95, you may need to run fdisk again to set the new drive's primary partition to active.

Good luck,

Steve

[dsolodow]

Don't do the xcopy trick!!! It doesn't work quite right... namely, all your longfilenames are likely to have their dos alias changed and this can really mess things up.... The best bet is to do this. Use something like Drive copy, drive image or ghost to copy your old drive to the new. Then,upgrade to win95b, then use something like partitionmagic to convert to fat32 and resize it... You want to copy then upgrade so that you're not sol if there is trouble with the upgrade. I use this method quite often where I work for exactly what you're trying. Never had a problem....

[stevet]

I have also never had a problem. You will not lose your long file names as long as you run xcopy from within Windows. The file names will be truncated, however, if you run xcopy from a DOS prompt. As for converting to FAT32, I have had problems using Microsoft's cvt.exe FAT32 conversion utility and have never gotten it to work properly. But you should not have to do any FAT conversions to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Steve

[This message has been edited by stevet (edited April 13, 1999).]

[garyhall]

I am aware of the "XCOPY" problem. Unfortunately, I do not have the correct "wording" in front of me, but I believe you should use XCOPY32. That brings across the proper long names. If you want, I will respond with the correct line command if there is any interest.

Since I have started this thread I have spoken with other peers and they have all suggested to upgrade to Win98. Sooooo, I guess I will do this instead of Win95b. Does anyone know of any popular DOS programs (eg: QuickBooks v 3) that will have a problem with Win98? Should I, for the most part, feel comfortable in upgrading to Win98 straight from the Win95a version.

Thanks. Gary