reinstallation will not accept OEM# 2

[y2k1981]

God somebody please help me. My friend recently bought a second hand computer with '95 (actually it says 95 plus - never heard of it myself) on it. Somebody (I don't know how, but it's irrelevant) had deleted some files etc so there are some system files corrupt now. I figured the easier thing was to re-run setup, however, as he doesn't have windows 95, I got a CD rom from work to reinstall it. No matter what OEM# I try, it doesn't work. I don't have the OEM# from the original installation, do I need to use that one? Is it looking for that OEM# again?

Second problem!! I did find a utility somewhere that will allow me to get the OEM# from the registry ... however, I also found a link on

http://www.95isalive.com

which brought me to here -->

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

I downloaded the utility to create the 95 boot disk and booted with it (I wanted to try this out before trying to reinstall '95). then I typed

sys C:

- and hey presto, it seemed pretty good. until I tried to boot, it says that I need DOS 8 or higher. so it won't boot into '95 (to get the original OEM# and see if that works) because it doens't have DOS 8 or higher and it won't let me finish the reinstallation either. What's a guy to do!?!?!

Before somebody asks, no, I didn't backup anything before I copied those files from the boot disk

please, can anybody help me out here?

 

[ITschoolGuy]

I don't know how helpful this will be but it's worth a try. The Windows 9x registry editor (REGEDIT.EXE) does have some functionality from a DOS prompt. If you can get your machine as far as a C:\> prompt, you can type regedit /? and see usage instructions for exporting the registry (or portions of it) to a text file.

If you can get the contents of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Setup key into a plain text file, you could then view the values using the DOS text editor (EDIT.COM) and find your OEM # or ProductKey.

Hope it works.

Chris

 

[y2k1981]

excellent, thanks. I'll have a go at that.

So do you think that when I'm reinstalling that it's looking for the OEM that was used for the original installation?

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

You can also just go to c: prompt then type "cd windows"...
without quotes then type "attrib system.dat -h -s -r"...
then type "edit system.dat" then i beleive it is alt+s to search and do a search for "product key" or "productID"
your problem is that setup is seeing the original product key and that is the one that it wants...

 

[y2k1981]

thanks buckeye, yeah, I'm pretty well up on DOS commands so I won't have any problem searching in the system.dat file for the info ... I didn't know that it was in there!! Had I known, I would have looked ages ago!!

I do have one other question, say I get the number and manage to get '95 to install - it will replace those files that it copied over from the floppy (when I entered

sys C:

) won't it? Or at least it'll tell me that it found a newer version already on the HDD will it and give me the choise of which one to use? If not, I'll still have the problem of it not running without DOS 8 or higher, won't I?

Anyway, thanks for your replies.

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

What i would do is get my hands on a 98 boot disk, boot to dos and then copy the 95 cab files over to the harddrive... then rename command.com, io.sys, and msdos.sys.. then runsetup from the cab files... what you want to make sure of is that the 95 cd you have is the same version or at least a newer version of what is on there,

 

[y2k1981]

hey buckeye ... don't want to sound stupid, but can you provide a little more detail? Boot to DOS using the '95 floppy, which cab files do I copy from the '95 CD? There are quiet a lot if memory serves me correct. Rename the command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys - what do I name them to? Are you just saying to rename them to any name so that there isn't a conflict with the new ones that are created during setup? Don't suppose you know what the PLUS thing is about? I do have another CD, not 100% sure what's on there, but there's some Y2K upgrades I think. One final question, why do you recomment that I use the '98 boot disk, why would it make any difference from using the '95 one when I'm going to be installing '95 anyway?

 

[koresnordic]

Just a little thing on the PLUS point. Microsoft released a plus pack of several different versions of Windows. Basically it included "extras" that people were expecting in the first place, but M$ didn't get a chance to put in in time. Extra screen saveers, fonts, icons, sounds, games etc. Instaling this, had the side effect of changing the load logo to the one you saw - "windows 95 plus".

Graham

 

[y2k1981]

so it's not really a different "version" of windows as such ... it's just additional "fun stuff" in a way?

 

[koresnordic]

In a way - yes. But a lot of people thought it should have been included in Windows in the first place.

Graham

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

the 98 boot disk will give you acess to your cdrom drive... the cab files are on the win95 cd in the win95 folder..copy everything from that folder to a folder on you c: drive then you can run setup from that fold instead of the cd... renaming the files like command.com to command.old is just so you dont get the dos conflict error..

 

[y2k1981]

I can access the CD rom with the 95 boot disk that I have, so I guess I can just use that one. so you're just saying to copy the cab files from the win95 directory to the HDD and run setup from that. what command would I enter to run setup using the cab files?

one other question, how come you would do it this way? Why wouldn't you just run setup from the CD rom?

Thanks agin to everybody for responding

 

[Crustyoldbloke]

If you are able to work within Windoze with the system file corruptions, you could try this (thanks to the person who wrote it originally - not me).

Copy the following into notepad and save it as Prodkey.js, then just click on it.
============================================================
var WSHShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell"
var ProductKey =
WSHShell.RegRead("HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Productkey"
WSHShell.Popup(ProductKey, 0, "Windows 95 Product CD Key", 64);
Regards
Phil

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

just remember that i said everything in that folder..just just the cab files...which will also include the setup.exe... the reason for running from the harddrive is two-fold one you wont be asked for the cd everytime you make changes and 2 95 had a problem of loosing the ide controllers on the first restart so when it ask for the cd to finish install the cdrom was unavailable and you had to skip everything until the primary and secondary controllers were installed... just saves alot of hassel

 

[y2k1981]

crustyoldbloke - thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, that won't work ... it's not getting that far. It used to, but then when I copied the system files from that bootable disk I got at bootdisks.com, it stopped going into windows, it just said incorrect DOS version.

buckeye, I understand what you're saying now, thanks for the advice I'll do that when I finally get around to installing it ... HOWEVER ... this just keeps gettin' better all the time!! I tried your suggestion last night of using edit.com to open the system.dat file after I'd removed the system, read only and hidden attributes. It "launched" edit.com but then gave me an error saying out of far memory - what does that mean? I never got to open the file. so, I decided to try schoolguy's suggestion about exporting part of the registry. I changed to the windows directory but when I entered regedit /? it said incorrect DOS version ... so like I said ... it just keeps gettin' better and better!!

Where are the registry keys stored? Does system.dat correspond to the system key in the registry? If so, could I rename system.dat to system.old and then use any OEM# - seing that it wouldn't be able to access the system.dat file, it mightn't look for the specifiec product ID??

or alternatively, could I undo what I done with the bootdisk from bootdisks.com so that it won't give the "incorrect DOS version" - it was going into windows before that started happening. If I could somehow get it into windows again, I could use that utility I spoke about to get the OEM# out of the registry perhaps ... ?

Again, thanks to everybody. I really do appreciate all your help. Hopefully somebody can guide where to go next, as I'm running low on ideas at this point.

 

[Crustyoldbloke]

Looking at your profile as a programmer, you ought to know when you're beat ................... it's about now.

Me thinks that you're moments away from doing 100% file compression; format c:

What say you? Regards
Phil

 

[y2k1981]

no way ..... never say die !!

If it was my own machine, it'd have formatted it ten times over by now ... but as it's not I don't want to do that. There have to be some other options? So close and yet so far

 

[wolluf]

y2k1981

From your original post - which version of the 95 boot disk did you download - and have you tried the other one? (run sys C: again). And do you know which version of 95 is on the PC - and is it the same as the install disk you are trying to use?

Have you considered a temporary parallel install (into \windows2 for example) to give you windows access to the filestore? (don't know how much space you have).

 

[y2k1981]

hey wolluf

Well, the link I posted above doesn't seem to be working now. However, when i downloaded them last friday, only the first link worked, the link to windows 95 (b) (at least I think that's what it said) was broken.

Do you think it would be worth my while copying some system files from another 95 machine at work and trying the

sys C:

again?

 

[y2k1981]

sorry, I didn't answer all of your question there. I don't know what version of 95 they have (I'm not too well up on 95 unfortunately) and I don't know what version is on the disk either, but I could check that.

What's a temporary parallel installation?