Boot your computer to Windows 95 and right click on the My computer
icon. Now left click on Properties. On the General Tab, look under the
"System:" line. There you will see the version number.
NOTE: If you have Windows 95 version 4.00.950b, make certain
you are not using the FAT32 file system. Double click the
My Computer icon, then right click the Drive C icon. Left click on
Properties. On the General tab, the "Type:" line will
indicate whether or not you have a FAT32 file system. If you
are using the FAT32 file system, then go directly to
Section 6 . Otherwise, continue with
Section 3.3.
- Run the Windows Explorer file manager program.
- On the Menu Bar, click on View, then click on Options.
On the View Tab, make sure that the "Show all files" radio
button is marked. Also, make sure that the line with "Hide MS-DOS
file extensions for file types that are registered" is unchecked.
Click on the OK button.
NOTE: If your hard drive already contains the *.dos files mentioned
in the
NOTE: of Section 2.3, then skip to the next
NOTE:. Otherwise, continue with
Section 3.4.
- Insert the DOS 5.0 or DOS 6.x bootable floppy into Drive A. Click
on the Drive A icon so you can see the contents on the floppy disk.
- Rename each file to a .dos file extension. You can do this by
single clicking on a file, pressing the F2 function key, and typing in
the new name. Do not worry if you need the bootable floppy to work
properly, just rename the files back after you are finished with this
procedure.
- EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Make sure you rename the files on the
floppy BEFORE you copy them to Drive C. Otherwise you will
overwrite your Windows 95 system files. You have been warned.
Now, copy all files to the root directory of Drive C. One method is to
click on the Drive A icon, press CTRL+A, press CTRL+C, click on the
Drive C icon, and press CTRL+V.
NOTE: If you do not have
Windows 95 OSR2 (version 4.00.950b), please skip to
Section 3.6.
- If (and only if) you have Windows95 version 4.00.950b, make sure
you have a file named Winboot.sys in the root directory of Drive C, as
stated in
Section 2.3 above. Failure to have Winboot.sys
in the root directory of Drive C will result in a system lockup should
you attempt to boot to an earlier version of DOS.
NOTE: If you are using a DOS 6.x boot disk skip to
Section 4, otherwise continue with the next step.
- Open Notepad. On the Menu Bar, click on Open. Change "Files
of type" to "All files (*.*)". Change "Look
in:" from Desktop to Drive C. Now open Config.dos by double
clicking on the filename. Delete all the contents. This will create a
0K file...I will explain later. Save the file.
- Use Notepad to open and edit Autoexec.dos and type in the Loadlin
command. The Loadlin command must be in the following syntax:
Loadlin DriveLetter:\LinuxKernelFile root=/dev/LinuxBootPartition ro
Here is my Autoexec.dos file as an example:
Loadlin f:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc2 ro
NOTE: The kernel, as well as the Loadlin.exe, file may be anywhere
on your hard drive as long as you reference the correct path. For
example, if your kernel file was located in the directory
e:\linux\kernels and Loadlin.exe was located in the directory c:\utils,
you would use:
c:\utils\loadlin e:\linux\kernels\vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc2 ro