Win 95 on an 80meg laptop?

[rampitdave]

I have been given an old Toshiba T4500 laptop running 3.1. I wanted to up to 95 so i formated th 80gig hd and hooked up my external CD. The install seemed to be going ok until i had to choose the installation type. I chose "custom" but windows stopped me stating it needed something just over 100meg.
I saw a T4500 on eBay a couple of weeks ago that was listed as running 95, so, can it be done??? If so how???

 

[SkipCox]

setup /id skips the disk space check.

setup /? will give you a list of all available switches for Win95 setup.

Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~scox9/index.html

 

[wolluf]

you're not really going to be able to run 95 on this machine - even if you get it to install, you've got no space to actually run anything.

 

[okiepc]

There is a way you can do this, I have done it in the past many times. Early on when Windows95 first came out, it came on a set of 23 floppy disks and as long as you had a floppy disk drive you could install it on a very small HDD as it used only about 35Mb of space. Now this was typical installation without any extra bells and whistles. If you plan on adding extras to this it will not work as your HDD is so small. Your only problem is finding a set of these disks.

okiepc

 

[wolluf]

okiepc - I don't think the floppy version is any different from the CD (ie, doesn't take up less space when installed)

 

[okiepc]

wolluf-actually when these Win95 "A" disks were first put out, they were barebones without a lot of files that came on the cd, the only reason I know is I had to deal with them years ago and still remember the pain of 23 floppy disks and how slow the process was and how many times the disks became bad, those are things you remember.

If you care to check, Microsoft has an article which touches on this subject. This article is # 149712 Microsoft Knowledge Base Article (how to install windows 95).

okiepc

 

[edfair]

The "A" or the plain jane original will install on about 62mb. But it won't go directly in off a CD because of the extra stuff that okiepc talks about. But if you will have somebody burn you a 95 CD with just the 2 files on the root and the stuff in win95 it will install in the same 62mb.
Or you could find an external parallel port zip and put the required stuff on it and install from there.
This is assuming that you are dealing with either the original or "A" version. The "B" requires about 110mb and the "C" requires about 130mb. I think they can be cut down a little but have never run a reduced install to find out.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[dilettante]

The smallest installation of Win95B I have managed was 30MB.

It required significantly more than that during installation of course, and this required some severe hacking of install INFs. This was also achieved using just generic hardware drivers, limiting me to SVGA at 800x600 and 16 color mode.

It was also extremely unstable. Trying to add network components for example resulted in fatal crashes because I'd ended up leaving out numerous critical components, mostly DLLs that belonged in Windows\SYSTEM.

I'm still at it for a specific reason, but the smallest stable installation I have managed was closer to 70MB - more like 88MB after installing video, network card, sound, modem, IDE, and USB drivers (yes, you can get USB running stably on Win95B if you have all the updates).

I had a similar Toshiba laptop (T6300C?) that had a 66 Mhz 486, 24MB of RAM, and a 250MB hard drive. For general use I see this as a pretty minimal platform for 95B, and I didn't have to do much shoehorning to get things in.

 

[diogenes10]

The 4500 and 4600 dont use the same batteries that mine does so I havent been watching those particular models. The T1900 series which I watch from time to time has a larger harddrive than yours and it is common to see them listed with win95 instead of win3.1 that most of them came with.

However, another thing I see is that people have upgraded the harddrive and added a memory expansion card-I saw some listings that made it pretty clear that had been done (T1900 series which is what mine is) so I decided to try that in order to have room for win95 and lotus smartsuite or ms office. For me at least, it turned into a pretty complicated process which I've still not finished with, but I think it is possible to do. My guess would be that either the machine you saw listed on eBay came with a larger drive than yours, or someone had upgraded it.

Starters for your thought process
Some info about the old laptops here:

http://home.att.net/~ronkar/toshiba.html

basic instructions about replacing harddrive here:

http://www.bixnet.com/toshiba2.html#T4500, T4600 Series

 

[wolluf]

rampitdave - did you ever resolve this? (would be nice for us to know outcome - and I know you logged on yesterday!)

 

[rampitdave]

The project is ongoing.
I did try the "setup/id" switch but that didn’t work, and none of the other available switches were of any use either.
I have been looking for a set of 95 floppies, but they seem to be selling for silly prices on eBay.
One thought I had was to make a cut down version of 95 using an old desktop system and deleting all the unnecessary files, and only keeping the bare minimum, then burning it onto a CD. Has anyone any ideas as to what I need to keep and what I can safely remove?

 

[TekTippy4U]

Have you got 95 a, b, c, cdrom? cdrom drive?

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[TekTippy4U]

I see you've got an external cdrom as you're able to run setup.

Has anyone here used the FDISK /FPRMT command for 95b and up only, to create a Fat32 smaller than 512mb.
I was thinking maybe a way to squeeze the data into 4 kb clusters or less?? and take up less slack space.

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[Blujacket]

That's a limit of FAT32, TekTippy4U, partition has to be bigger than 512MB.

Chart at bottom of

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...oc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp

 

[TekTippy4U]

This is part of the "undocumented" my friend

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[edfair]

I think the lowest is 240. But cluster size is the least of his worries at 80mb.

I have 1 or 2 sets of floppies buried away somewhere. Try e-mail.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[TekTippy4U]

rampitdave;
More of a 98er myself, so i'm not sure what's exactly available to you on the 95cdrom. the 98cd has the resource kit book to look at for custom setup scripts/installs (offline). Here's the online version for info

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...net/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part1/wrkc03.asp

allow activex temporarily and you can navigate around.

thinking you write a custom script using/editing msbatch.inf for minimal installation. this link refers to 95 and dos alot and you can find all the switches there too. maybe even make a trial run on a desktop to test it then copy over the setup files, run the script from dos.
A larger disc would be best for functionality though.

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[TekTippy4U]

One more try rampitdave;

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/win95/setup.asp

found this more 95 specific
in this section "Comprehensive Guide to Troubleshooting Setup in Windows 95", on the tree.

I have no idea why they say you only need;
"20 MB of free hard-disk space is required for a local installation"
and
"The full custom installation requires a minimum of 19 MB. A compact installation requires 10 MB of disk space.
You need at least 14 MB of memory, which can be divided between RAM and hard disk space. For example, if your computer has 4 MB of RAM, you need at least 10 MB of free disk space for a swap file. If your computer has 16 MB of memory, you will need very little disk space for a swap file."


TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs..All involved shall be spared the grief.

 

[diogenes10]

Found the following in a book while cleaning over the weekend:
------------------------------------------------------
Que
Windows 95 installation and configuration handbook
1997

4 install types: Custom, Typical, Portable, Compact.

"If you have limited disk space on your computer, select the Compact Setup Option. This Setup option installs only those files necessary to run Windows 95, which ranges from 10M to 30M of hard disk space." (p41)

Table 1-3 Files installed during windows95 setup

typical custom portablecompact
accessories Y Y N N
backup Y Y N N
bitmaps Y Y y N
briefcase N N Y N
compression ut. Y Y Y Y
dialup Y Y Y N
dirct cable Y Y Y N
games Y Y N N
hyperterm Y Y Y N
multimedia file Y Y Y N
maint. tools Y Y Y Y
paint Y Y N N
scr. savers Y Y Y N
win95 tour Y Y N N
word pad Y Y N N

Also available but must be selected during install or installed later.
Internet mail service
MS Exchange
MS Fax
MS Network
Network admin tools
Online users guide
---------------------------------------------------------
Dont know which version(s) this would apply to, thats why I gave the copyright date.