Windows NT installs its own bootstrap program -- the one that lets you choose between Windows 95 and NT at start-up. Just deleting Windows NT's files won't stop the bootstrap program from attempting to load. You could set Windows 95 as the default operating system in the Windows NT Control Panel's System applet. Then when you boot, the bootstrap program will default to Windows 95.
The best thing to do, though, is either reinstall Windows 95 (which will replace NT's bootstrap program with Windows 95's) or use DOS's sys command to replace the bootstrap program. To do the latter, create a Windows 95 Startup floppy disk (select Start--Settings--Control Panel, double-click the Add/Remove Programs icon, click the Startup Disk tab, and click the Create Disk button. Boot with it, then issue the command sys c:. Remove the disk and restart. Windows 95 should load normally. Now you can delete the NT directory tree (usually \winnt) and the files it leaves in the root directory: ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini, and pagefile.sys.
One last tip -- if you installed Windows NT on an NTFS logical drive in your hard disk's extended partition (in other words, on any partition other than c:), you won't be able to remove the partition by using the fdisk utility that comes with Windows 95 or MS-DOS. It will just tell you there aren't any logical drives to delete -- even though there are -- and you won't be able to delete the extended partition until you delete the logical drives it contains.
You can delete the logical drive with an NTFS-compatible utility like PowerQuest's PartitionMagic (http://www.powerquest.com), then use fdisk to create a new FAT partition. Or you can reinstall NT on the first partition and then use its own tools to remove the NTFS logical drive in the extended partition.
- Scott Spanbauer
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