Windows 95 in Virtual PC

I'm trying to run a copy of Windows 95 in Virtual PC for test purposes. However, any time I try to start, it gives me the following error:

While initializing device IOS:
Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer.

Is it simply that my PC is too fast to run it? I have a Core 2 Duo E6420 with 2GB of RAM but I only have 32MB assigned to the virtual machine.

Think I sorted it. I disabled virtualisation for that VM and it appears to be working.

Capt'n Midnight

one of the other things that caused that was the drivespace/double space driver conflicting with various video cards. it's not as if you are ever going to use those drivers and you might as well free up 640KB memory

simpliest fix was to
Deltree c:\*.bin

Yep I remember that one alright. Don't have DriveSpace installed anyway, hardly needed with the storage capacity of the day. Could be used for some cunning tricks, I remember someone tried to sell me a PC with a 4GB hard disk which he used two 2:1 compressed 2GB FAT16 partitions to make it appear as an 8GB drive!

Capt'n Midnight

had a machine with a dying 60MB drive and the only drive we had was a 50
as luck would have it there were duplicate folders on both C: an so all the unique files would fit on the 50MB drive

so used subst C:\ so all the paths would work

worked fine till someone removed some "duplicated" folders from to make some space

derby7

I would be interested in how you got this going? ie. especially the CD booting part! What are the steps needed pls?

I have a custom made boot floppy which dates back to the olden days, pre XP. I made an image of that using WinImage and then mounted it in Virtual PC. The disk has the FDISK and FORMAT applications on it as well as CD-ROM drivers so it's pretty much all I need to get the installation running.

I often used that disk to revive other people's machines, used to hate when they commented on the "Starting Windows 95..." message while it was booting - they seemed to think I was downgrading their machine!

astrofool

www.bootdisk.com has win98 and Me boot disks

derby7

But I think this is my problem, I dont have a Floppy drive, how do I make a bootable CD with old boot-floppy software.