I have a Pentium 133 with 48Mb RAM and two hard drives (1.2Gb and 850Mb). I used to run a dual-boot system (Windows 95 and DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11) without any problems. Recently I installed the Windows 95 OEM version on top of DOS 6.22. This was running fine until I installed Windows 3.11 under the DOS 6.22 environment. Then I restarted the computer and it would not boot up at all, even though I could see the "Starting Windows 95..." line. I tried to install them in a different order: DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, then Windows 95. But the Windows 95 setup program told me that it could not upgrade from the previous Windows version.
Does this mean that I cannot dual-boot my system if I am using the Windows 95 OEM version? Will Windows 97 be the same? Any suggestions would be appreciated, as I really need to use DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 as well.
By the way, I did not format my hard disks using FAT32. I always use DOS 6.22 to format them.
- Qi Liang
Windows 95 OEM Release 2 is not designed to be dual-bootable. The safest and most flexible solution is to use a third party boot manager, such as System Commander (Checkmark Technologies: (02) 9957 6970) or the boot manager that is part of Windows NT. There are also one time patch programs such as Win95Boot (http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~jwes/win95boot.html) or DosBoot (http://home.t-online.de/home/ralf.buschmann/dosboot.zip), but there can be no guarantee that these will work reliably.
Alternatively, there is a trick that should restore dual-booting to your computer. Find a machine set up with DOS 6 and copy the files io.sys, msdos.sys, config.sys, and autoexec.bat to a floppy disk. Rename the copies io.dos, msdos.dos, config.dos and autoexec.dos respectively, then copy them to the root directory of your computer. You should also copy across the contents of the DOS directory. On the Win95 computer, edit c:\msdos.sys and add the line BootMulti=1. This procedure applies to the first release of Windows 95 as well as to OEM Release 2. If you are running OEM Release 2, you will also need to copy c:\io.sys (on the Win95 computer) to c:\winboot.sys; this will prevent a lockup when you reboot.
Restart your computer and when the "Starting Windows 95?" message appears, press <F4> to boot DOS 6. Now you can install Windows 3.x.
Remember that configuring your computer for dual-booting means that the drive or partition that you are booting from has to be formatted using FAT16, and when you boot using DOS you will only be able to access FAT16 drives.
- Roy Chambers
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Category: Win95, OS/2
Issue: Jun 1997
Pages: 155
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Dual-booting with Windows 95 OEM Release 2