QEMU/Guests/Windows 95: Difference between revisions

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oops!!!
(holy shit this sucks)
(oops!!!)
 
The following drivers:
# any GD5446 Windows 95 driver for the Cirrus PCI VGA emulated on QEMU in case the copy of 95 you are installing doesn't have it. The ISA version <precode>isa-cirrus-vga</precode> doesn't function properly and shouldn't be used.
# the BMIDE95 driver for the IDE disk controller so you can enable DMA for faster disk access (something you will seriously need)
 
Make a qcow2 image (or a raw image if you want) by typing
<precode>qemu-img create -f qcow2 win95.img 700M</precode>
 
'''700M''' can be replaced with however big you want the hard drive to be (with M standing for Megabytes). Windows 95 is not a space hog or resource intensive, being such an old OS - you can even make the disk space as low as 70MB (for a compact installation) but this is not recommended. Windows 95 RTM does not support hard drives more than 2 GB due to it only supporting FAT16 partitions by default. This can be circumvented using the OnTrack Disk Manager although it is just recommended to install OSR2 as it will make your experience much easier and less tedious.
When that's done, run the following command:
 
<precode>qemu-system-i386 -hda win95.img -cdrom win95_iso_name.iso -fda patcher9x<ver>.ima -boot a -accel kvm -device cirrus-vga,vgamem_mb=16 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -rtc base=localtime</precode>
 
You may adjust this if needed, Windows 95 is very picky on your configuration and may outright become sentient and refuse to boot.
 
=====Part 1: Patching Windows 95 itself first:=====
# Run <precode>fdisk</precode> and create an partition, on the first screen that prompts you whenever you want FAT32 support or not, if you're installing OSR2 hit Y, if you're installing RTM hit N. Reboot after you're done. Format the drive with <precode>format C:</precode>.
# Go to your newly created C:\ drive and create any folder you may wish on it where you are going to store the contents of the WIN95 folder from the Win95 installation CD. This is required to be done so the files can be patched using patcher9x. This guide assumes you have created an folder on the root of the C:\ drive called <precode>95cd</precode>.
# Go into your newly created folder then copy the contents over using <precode>copy D:\win95\*.* .</precode>. It might take an while to copy so be patient.
# After it's done copying, navigate back to the A: drive and run the following utility called patch9x. If you run it without any parameters the program will ask you to enter the path to an existing Windows installation or an path to the Windows installation files. Proceed to write the full path to the folder with the contents with the WIN95 folder contents copied from the CD. Then in the next step select the 4th option which will unpack all of the CAB files and patch any files if needed. This can be automated by just running <precode>patch9x -auto C:\95cd 4</precode>.
 
=====Part 2: Actually installing Windows 95:=====
Now that you've patched the Windows 95 installation files, you need to boot into the original Windows 95 boot disk in order to actually install Windows itself due to various compatibility problems which won't be listed here for the time being.
# When you have entered the Windows 95 boot disk and everything has loaded, run <precode>lock C:</precode> to unlock direct access to the drive. This is required as otherwise Windows 95 will fail to install.
# Navigate to the C:\ drive and the folder where your Windows 95 installation files reside and then run <precode>setup /is</precode> to skip ScanDisk and begin installing straight away.
# Proceed to install it normally, if it prompts you to automatically detect any devices such as Sound devices or Networking adapters, do NOT tick anything and just hit Next.
# Then after the installation is finally done, open the QEMU Monitor with Ctrl-Alt-2 and first eject the floppy with <precode>eject floppy0</precode> then run <precode>boot_set c</precode> to set the first primary boot device to be the Hard disk.
# Reboot.
 

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