Installing Windows 95 on Qemu

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First of all Windows 95 will run on Qemu.. Yes even the hokey Windows 95a. However the PCI support from the first version of Windows 95 is.. not all that good. Prepare for hell.

requirements

I've found that you really need four key things for a good Qemu Windows 95 system:

  • Intel PCI drivers for 95
  • VMB video driver for 95
  • 8029 NIC driver for 95
  • mkisofs for building an install CD with tools..

Optional would be Internet Explorer 5.5sp2.. which is the last version to run on Windows 95.

rough guide

The first thing I did was to grab a bootdisk & make sure I could fdisk/format the hard disk & mount a CD-ROM.. Now if you don't have a good bootdisk for MS-DOS or an MS-DOS intall set, I'd recommend bootdisk.com

I'm using a real CD-ROM with Windows 95.. It's the 'upgrade' version so there is a little hackery to get around installing Windows 3.1..

The first thing you'll need to do is create a virtual hard disk. Because Windows 95 is a fat16 OS you can only have 2GB max partitions.. So I just create a 2gb disk.. I think the 'minimum' you would want would be 200MB.. 

qemu-img create -f qcow win95.disk 2G

Anyways for the first boot on Qemu 0.10.5 it looks like this: 

qemu -L . -hda win95.disk -m 32 -M isapc -cdrom \\.\d: -fda bootfloppy.vfd -boot a

This will create & run a Windows 95 ISA machine, mount the physical CD-ROM and boot from the 'floppy'. From here you'll want to fdisk & format the hard drive.. It's not that hard with MS-DOS 6.22 as it'll want to just do it (keep hitting 1!)..

From the it will want to reboot, and you can format the hard disk.... 

format c: /s/u/v:hard_disk/q

Now with the disk formatted, I'm going to 'assume' your boot disk can read the CD-ROM.. I prep a fake windows 3.1 directory, and then copy the install files to the hard disk... 

c:
cd \
md install
cd install
md win95
cd win95
copy d:\win95\*.* .
cd \
md win
cd win
dir > win.com
md system
cd system
dir > win386.exe

Ok, now from here I'd close Qemu, and start it up like this: 

qemu -L . -hda win95.disk -m 32 -M isapc -soundhw sb16 -vga std

This forces the virtual machine to have a Soundblaster 16 & standard VGA. The cirrus drivers in Windows 95a will *NOT* work with Qemu... Also we are still going to install this as an ISA computer. Once MS-DOS has done it's quick boot (no config.sys/autoexec.bat) we go ahead and run windows setup. 

cd install\win95
setup
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