[vox-tech] floppy madness

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Wed 28 Apr 04,  8:23 AM, Ken Bloom <kabloom@ucdavis.edu> said:
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 07:05:52AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I made a bootable CD using the "DOS" that comes with Windows 95.  It's
> > the kind of DOS that says "Starting Windows 95" at boot time.
> > 
> > I tried to run the executable that should upgrade the BIOS, but got the
> > message:
> > 
> >    A:\> bios_6bx.exe
> >    This program must be run under Win32.
> > 
> > Can someone tell me precisely what Windows 95 is?  I was under the
> > impression that the DOS that comes with Win95 *is* actually win32.  It's
> > the win32 kernel without graphics support.  At least that was my
> > understanding.  Can someone explain what the relation is between Windows
> > 95 and the "DOS" that comes with it?
>  
> I know that Windows 95 is an evolution of the DOS product line, but I
> don't know the exact details of how it works. My totally uneducated
> guess would be that DOS starts, then at some point it starts Windows.
> 
> At any rate, the Win32 apis are implemented in kernel32.dll and
> user32.dll (I think those were the names), but your floppy disk has
> only three (four?) files on it:
> msdos.sys
> io.sys
> command.com
> bios_6bx.exe (?)
> (The first two are the MS-DOS kernel, the third is the shell)
> 
> This is MS-DOS of olde, without the Win32 APIs.
> 
> > 
> > It looks like I'll have to use Ryan's idea of finding a Windows hard
> > drive to swap into this computer.
> 
> My name isn't Ryan. ;)
 
Heh.  I was actually thinking about my "Great Spam Adventure" post.  He
had replied, and I've been meaning to get back to him, but fixing my
wife's computer takes precedence over that.

In any event, I think I now understand why it wouldn't run.  It wasn't
the flash utility itself --- the it was a self-extracting zip file,
which requires the ability to put a window on the screen and draw a
picture of a file uncompressing.  Jeez.  Talk about non-functionality.

Well, I have my wife's old win95 running on this computer.  I just
extracted the BIOS flash utility but it won't run.  But now that it's
extracted, I'll try booting into non-graphicalk win95 and see if it
works there.

For the record, win95 will work on an SMP machine.  It probably just
ignores the second CPU.  I've been too busy to investigate that further.

Holy cow.  I feel like I've been walking miles, in a strong wind,
uphill, in wet mud.  Every little thing I want to try becomes a huge
task only to find it doesn't work.  This is exhausting!

Pete

-- 
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.  -- Albert Einstein
GPG Instructions: http://www.dirac.org/linux/gpg
GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D