[Relocito]

changed hard drive wthat was working perfectly to another hard drive(same type same computer) . I used floppy boot after turning on and hit enter. starting windows 95 appears on monitor along with an A> what should I do to strt windows95.

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boot floppies are used to install window...they do not have windows on them


you need a windos cd or floppies to ruun setup

[gerryf]

boot floppies are used to install window...they do not have windows on them


you need a windos cd or floppies to ruun setup

[Relocito]

both hard drives have windows 95 installed. Im thinking it could be the BIOS. Im not sure which boot disk I used.....

[gerryf]

if both harddrives had win95 on it, you don't need a boot disk at all...simply place the second drive in there and boot.

Windows 95 and 98 had a remarkable ability to actually move a drive from one system to another and have windows hardware detection actually kick in half the time, and simply reinstall new hardware.

All you need is a windows cd...if it lacks a driver, windows setup will ask for the CD.

It sounds like you have a machine where this will not work? (did you try it?)

[Relocito]

What I get "when switch is turned to on " the computer starts and the monitor message is os cannot be found. I them install boot floppy. message says starting windows 95 and theA> appear. that is as far as it gets. I dont think I lost data I just believe the drive changed and I do not know how to get it back..

[gerryf]

I repeat, the boot floppy is only booting a windows 95 version of DOS...not windows.

Given your description, it sounds like your boot record is messed up

Do you have (i feel like I said this before)

a windows cd
or
the windows installation floppies

What are you trying to do? Why are you moving disks around? It would help to know what you are trying to accomplish

[Relocito]

Gerryf
what I was trying to do was inter- change drives One was working great. I wanted to see what I had on the other drive both have win95 on them . I thought I could just swap.....

My question is how to I boot to windows???????

Edited by Relocito, 09 April 2005 - 06:00 PM.

[gerryf]

I know what your question is, but the answer is not so simple.

This is what happens when your computer boots.

A) power on self test (post)
b) Computer looks at boot record on first track of drive, loads whatever is there.
c) Windows starts, based on the hardware If you put a harddrive with windows on it from another computer, it sees that the HARDWARE is different and sometimes---sometimes, it will try to install the hardware drivers and start....sometimes, it just dies.

Yours just died.

Could be the hardware is so different, could be the mbr is bad. You may be able to restore the master boot record, but you may not

What you SHOULD do in your situation is return the original drive to the computer, then add the second drive as a slave, if all you want it to retrieve data.

[Relocito]

where is "master boot record" found. and how do I retrieve it.
Can't change directories.
"mbr" what is that

[gerryf]

You don't....find it, You can repair it by typing

fdisk /mbr from a floppy, but I am trying to tell you that something more is going on here (likely)

Is there are reason why

"What you SHOULD do in your situation is return the original drive to the computer, then add the second drive as a slave, if all you want it to retrieve data."