Here's the situation. I recently bought a new old laptop (Gateway Solo 2100 120MHz Pentium, 72 MG of RAM) off of eBay. It had no hard drive. I bought a 5 GB hard drive. I wanted to put in Win 98. I put in a 98 boot disk, loaded the system files and formatted the drive. Then I saw the system requirements for 98 and thought it wouldn't work too well. I then put in a 95 boot disk and nothing happens so I physically erase the files that I can see when use a dir command, which were command.com and scandisk log. I put in the 95 boot disk again and then it says "type command interpreter". I typed in a few hundred commands but nothing works, the message just comes back up on the next line. The floppy drive makes a duh duh duh in a rythmic pattern when I type in a command(unlike my desktop PC which works fine). I also try my 95 system disk in the cd drive but still nothing. Is nothing happening because my floppy drive (or media bay) stopped working or did I mess up and need to get a new hard drive? Are the hidden system files causing this problem?
Note: I changed the boot process in the BIOS to A: then C:. It will try to read the floppy (I can tell because of the noise) but nothing happens (same with the cd) and then goes to the 98 splash screen and then the command interpreter error.
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2007-01-07 15:31:06 · 3 answers · asked by Sean S 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Laptops & Notebooks
Sounds like you got the DOS version mixed up during this process. The absolute best thing you could do is zero out the drive and start over with a 95 boot disk. Once you install 98, the DOS version is updated and sometimes the file system is set to FAT 32 or FAT 16, and FAT 16 will work but it depends on which 95, possibly. Not sure, to be honest, but I learned the hard way that once you install a newer OS and try to go back, the only way to do it is by blanking out the disk, best done with the disk's manufacturers utililies, and starting over with the earlier OS's startup disk or CD.
2007-01-07 15:40:31 · answer #1 · answered by heartmindspace 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You need to run the win98 fdisk and delete the 98 partition. Once you have a clean hdd, boot with the 95 install disk and create a 95 partition. Then continue with the 95 install...
2007-01-07 15:42:28 · answer #2 · answered by THX1138 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
With 95 you have to install DOS first then 95 on top of it.
2007-01-07 15:34:57 · answer #3 · answered by ZX3R 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋