W95 and W3.1?

[FZWG]

Appreciate some assistance.

Trying to help a friend with his PC. It is "supposed" to have W3.1 and W95 installed on its hard drive, with System Commander as the boot manager.

When it boots, it goes directly to W95 (4.00.950).

How can you tell if W3.1 is somewhere in the hard drive? There is only one 3.2 GB HD, and I see no partitions.

[lynchmob]

Win3.1 is an operating enviroment run over dos-not an operating system in itself.If the comp has w95(version?)on it,everything may have been upgraded.I have heard you can dual-boot these two ie.dos 6.22 with w3.1 on top and w95.I would think they would need thier own partition as there'd be trouble running two different versions of dos on the same partition.Unless its possible to toggle between the GUIs using the same version of dos.
You could try this:start in pure dos.At the c:\prompt type win and hit enter.Dont know if it'll work but worth a try.
lynch

[This message has been edited by lynchmob (edited 07-08-2001).]

[FZWG]

lynchmob,

Thank you for your reply.

In My Computer, Drive C shows up as having only 1047MB. The pc has a 3.2GB hard drive, and FDISK shows 2 partitions: Partition #1 as active with 2047MB, and partition #2 (not active), with 1047MB. It appears W95 is running from partition #2 which has the 1047MB!! Somehow it became the active partition?

W95 MSDOS.SYS file is set to BootMulti=1.

Any ideas of how to get the remaining 2047MB to show up?




[This message has been edited by FZWG (edited 07-08-2001).]

[lynchmob]

Sorry for not replying sooner.
This one has me a bit stumped.Dont know the answer to that right off hand.What ver. of fdisk are you using to read the partition info?Is it a win95 bootdisk or an older one?
Try hitting the left control key(or f8) while booting up and look at your boot menu.If win3.1 is still present,there should be an option "Start Previous Operating System".
That is if you have everything as fat16.Otherwise it wont work.
Also,these files must be renamed:
IO.sys to IO.dos
msdos.sys to msdos.dos
config.sys and autoexec.bat from dos must have the .dos file extension.
All these files must be in root.
You may end up having to save what's important and do a fresh install of w95.It'll be alot easier,I think.HTH
lynch

[solo-pc-tech]

One scenario, System Commander was last booted to Win95, then deactivated. That is why it is booting to the second partition.

Can you reactivate System Commander? Or is System Commander still appearing at boot, but quickly booting Win95 by default? There should be a way to enter System Commander setup. I used SC a couple of years ago, but didn't like it and can't remember the boot screen in any detail.

[FZWG]

lynchmob and solo-pc-tech,

Thank you for your replies.

Tried your suggestions, and got an error message when trying to reactivate System Commander: "Cannot open C:SYSCMDR.SYS File cannot be found".

Used FDISK to display the partitions and reset the active one, but it was no go.

It may be time to FDISK plus Format, and press on.

PC owner is leaning towards scrubbing the boot management and installing W98.

Once again, thanks for the help.