Me again =) win95b OEM -reinstall

I keep reading how people here use the full version win95b as an upgrade\reinstall by renaming win.com and sometimes win.ini, but every time I try it, it blows up..I end up on restart with a bunch of "can't compress monolithic file" and vmm32 errors and thats the end of that.....what the heck am I doing wrong? I had someone today deleted (even from recycle)a bunch of system files "by mistake" and couldnt boot (not just a sys problem either)...needed to do a reinstall but ended up worse than I started.

[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited April 14, 1999).]

I have done the upgrade dozens of times and have never had the kind of problems you are experiencing. Here is the EXACT way that I do it, step by step:

1. From a DOS c: prompt, (not a DOS box within Windows) go to the windows directory and rename win.com to win.old.

cd \windows
ren win.com win.old

2. Do a cd\ to get back to the root directory and create a directory on the hard drive called win95.

cd\
md win95

3. Copy the entire contents of the Win95B CD's win95 directory to your new directory on the hard drive.

copy d:\win95\*.* c:\win95

Note: Installing from the hard drive is not necessary, but it speeds up the install and elimininates the need to ever have to insert the Win95 CD later on.

Another note: You may not have enough hard drive space to copy the .cabs AND do the upgrade. Win95B setup requires something like 70 MB of free space.

4. After the copy has finished, change into the c:\win95 directory and run setup.

cd win95
setup

5. When the setup program asks you what directory you want to install Win95 to, the default will be c:\windows.000. Change it to c:\windows (or whatever your old windows directory is).

Then just complete the install like a regular Windows 95 installation. That should do it. Like I said, I have followed this prodedure many times without any problems.

Let me know if you have any more questions,

Good luck, :-)

Steve

[This message has been edited by stevet (edited April 15, 1999).]

That is almost exactly what I did except I renamed win.com, booted to command prompt, install cd driver, restart again to command prompt, ran setup from 95 cd
(does it have to be the setup inside win95 dir I didn't think it mattered), runs fine till second reboot, then dies with those errors..I can copy to C: -have like 3gb free, but didnt see the need ...have done it for many that way before...and I did redirect to c:\windows when it asked...I am trying to avoid having to reinstall about 5hrs worth of software.
And this is not the first time -exactly the same problem when I try to reinstall, have tried it like 3 other times.. I really wish I could get it to work for this one tonite...I will try exactly as you say see what happens... I really appreciate your help...

[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited April 15, 1999).]

Jeanne, sounds like you have a device problem in the old registry. Try saving a copy of the system.dat & system.da0 to another directory, rerun setup & watch what devices are being loaded. Make sure you pick out the standard VGA driver, you can change that later. Good Luck

Charlie

system was working perfectly till files got deleted, and I saw that it put VGA during setup itself (it has a SB Banshee) On second reboot it comes up with the monolithic file error and then one after another \vmm32\*.vxd errors then goes to you can now shutdown your computer =(
thanx

Hi again Jeanne,

It sounds like everything you are doing is fine EXCEPT the reboots. After renaming win.com I would avoid rebooting the computer. Renaming win.com should be the last thing you do before starting Win95B setup. So first install your CD-ROM DOS driver, then reboot, then rename win.com and go directly to setup without restarting.

I hope this helps,

Steve

BTW, you can run the installation from the Win95 CD withough copying the .cabs to the hard drive and it should work the same way.

I was thinking ...do you think it's cuz IE4 is installed that I'm having trouble?
I got OSR2.5 today I'm going to try ...I will ren win.com as you said...I thought since OSR2.5 has IE4 in it maybe it would help?
thanx again

Well, just tried, it didn't work fatal errors
I'm gonna try win98 upgrade I would still like to know for next time tho

That didn't work either...reformatted, but like I said I would like to know why it didn't work, if it is IE4 can it be removed from dos somehow?

[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited April 16, 1999).]

I wonder if you have some kind of hardware problem on this system. It sounds like you are doing everything right. IE4 is a problem, but I've never seen it cause fatal errors. For future reference, if you ever have to install/reinstall Win95 (up to OSR2.1) on a system which already has IE4 or 5 installed, you must uninstall IE before running Win95 setup. Win95 (pre-OSR2.5) will install IE2 of IE3 and will really mess things up. One symptom of the problem is that you lose the ability to drag and drop icons and files. The only way to fix it is to go out to DOS, manually uninstall the remains of IE4, and then install Win95 again. Now that IE5 is out, I would imagine that reinstalling Win95 OSR2.5 or Win98 on a system which already has IE5 will cause similar problems.

Anyway, back to the topic, I'm thinking that your problems with this particular system are related to the original mistake that the user made when all of those system files were deleted. Like I said, I have done the upgrade many times, but never on a system which had severe problems. You might be fighting a losing battle where the only solution is a reformat.

I hope that I've helped at least a little bit, :-)

Steve

yes you have helped alot, thanx, I appreciate the time you spent here...
As far as removing ie4, if I can get into windows I would try to uninstall it, but if I can't get in windows at all, as in this case, from dos how would I do it if I needed to..I know you say manually...but what exactly do I have to look for? Just so I know cuz I'm sure I'll see it again



[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited April 17, 1999).]