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I have some trouble trying to install Windows 95 on an old Seagate ST3120A drive (106 MB size). The computer of this installation is an old Am386DX old school PC. Before this I installed Windows 95 on a 640 MB Quantum hard drive under my Celeron host PC and it worked fine, but the 386 PC was unable to boot from the hard drive (too big).

The problem appears when Windows 95 copies its files to the hard drive. It appears to get stuck around 75-85% and it throws some random errors, like divide by zero or vcache errors.

Every time I try to install Windows, the setup formats the hard drive successfully.

Celeron host PC specs:

  • Intel Celeron D 2.4GHz

  • 256 MB RAM

  • ATI Radeon AGP video card

  • CD-ROM drive

I tried the following:

  • Changed CD-ROM

  • Changed Windows 95 installation CD

Unfortunately after I zero filled the drive with 2 passes, it revealed 34 errors. Then I tested it with HDD Tune and found 2 bad sectors.

enter image description here

The bad sectors look like they are at the 55 MB position. Maybe that's why the installation is frozen.

Can I still use the hard drive to install Windows 95?

snaks20
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  • Are you sure the 106mb drive is fine? – Journeyman Geek Nov 21 '15 at 11:56
  • I"m not sure as i found it in a repository.It could have bad sectors. – snaks20 Nov 21 '15 at 12:12
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    You could connect it to a more modern setup/liveCd and full format it. That should reveal bad sectors or rule them out. – Hennes Nov 21 '15 at 12:36
  • Thanks. I will try using Hiren's boot CD utility and post the results in the comments. – snaks20 Nov 21 '15 at 12:39
  • I used HDDscan and Victoria hard drive utilities and found no bad sectors. – snaks20 Nov 21 '15 at 13:24
  • Zero fill the drive then try install again. – Moab Nov 21 '15 at 22:12
  • Note that you also can partition the drive icreating a <50MB partition and installl win95 on that. Then use the rest for a second partition (IIRC win95 does mark bad sectors for its FAT tables. I had no idea that modern windows no longer did so). – Hennes Nov 22 '15 at 14:13
  • @Hennes: Modern Windows can still mark bad sectors in FAT/NTFS metadata tables, they just don't do it during a "full format". Prior to Vista it did a read-scan for bad sectors but didn't overwrite data. People expected a "full format" would fully obliterate and clean all data on a drive - it didn't, and didn't overwrite anything but the FAT/MFT itself. Combine that with the fact modern drives remap sectors internally, reducing the need for the OS to do so, and Vista+ flipped the format around so consumers who thought format deleted everything didn't leave sensitive data lying around. – qasdfdsaq Nov 23 '15 at 12:15

1 Answers1

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You have bad sectors on the drive. Whether this is the sole cause of the problem I don't know, but it needs to be sorted first nonetheless.

What you should do is connect it to a more modern PC or LiveCD and do a surface scan. On XP and above, this is done with the chkdsk /r command. On WinME and prior, the command is scandisk /surface is required.

Don't just "connect it to a more modern setup/liveCd and full format it". Don't just "Zero fill the drive then try install again."

The reason formatting it on a modern setup won't work is newer editions of Windows (Vista and above) do not actually read or check the disk when you perform a format - instead, they do a zero fill which overwrites but does not fix any bad sectors.

The reason zero fill won't work is because older drives do not have the onboard logic to invisibly remap sectors that modern drives do. Consequently they rely on the OS and filesystem to remap the sectors. XP and below will do so during a full format, Vista and above will not. A surface scan on the other hand will remap on any version of DOS or Windows.

qasdfdsaq
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  • I must specify that i haven't used any kind of modern setup to format the hard drive, because i don't have any PC with Windows Vista and later that is able to detect my hard drive. I used a Windows XP live CD on my Celeron PC and a custom program (DiskWipe) to zero fill the drive. So, how can i fix the bad sectors on the drive ? – snaks20 Nov 22 '15 at 17:54
  • Run chkdsk not zero fill. – qasdfdsaq Nov 22 '15 at 19:47
  • After I have ran chkdsk, I used HDD Regenerator and found out that I have two physical bad sectors. Maybe someone dropped it in the repository. The only solution is to create a partition up to the bad sectors as I heard from Hennes. – snaks20 Nov 23 '15 at 06:58
  • Do. Not. Use. HDD. Regenerator. – qasdfdsaq Nov 23 '15 at 12:11
  • Why ? I haven't done anything to the hard drive other than the standard windows format tool. Is it bad in some sort of way ? – snaks20 Nov 23 '15 at 14:17
  • Because you are only confusing yourself. – qasdfdsaq Nov 24 '15 at 14:08
  • Ok. How should i proceed next ? – snaks20 Nov 24 '15 at 15:22
  • Once you have conducted a surface scan, install Windows onto it without reformatting. – qasdfdsaq Nov 24 '15 at 16:11
  • Ok. I will try this and post an update. – snaks20 Nov 24 '15 at 16:14
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    Wow. What you said actually worked ! I finally booted into Windows 95 and it's running fine. Thank you very much ! – snaks20 Nov 24 '15 at 18:04