Creating a win95 rescue disk from within Linux
 

Well, the subject says it. A friend has an old windows 95 system at his office and they have no boot or rescue disks whatsoever. I finally completely got rid of my windows XP system so now all I have is SuSE Linux 9.0. I can find the .exe file to download to create a bootdisk for windows 95 but can't seem to figure out what I need to do or if it is even possible to create this disk from within linux. I tried to use wine but it only partially gets the job done then seg faults. Anyone have any suggestions and if so, I have found 4 different .exe files to download called plain, a, b, and part2 so i am a little confused about which one of these files is the right one or at least the one I need. i am looking for the one that will have the tools on it such as fdisk and so on...I hope that this is clear enough.TIA//peter

I'm not a wine expert so I wouldn't know if there were any tweaks that would get the program to work. My first guess would be no.

Do you have any family/friends that have a windows PC? That would be the easiest solution.

I do have a W95 boot floppy but can not get to it until next week. If you haven't found a solution by that time I could email you an image file that you can use dd to recreate the floppy.

You could get a bootdisk image from http://bootdisk.com/ and write it to a floppy with dd.

Must be new. bootdisk.com didn't used to have non DOS boot images. I didn't see a win95 version. It should work but it depends on what utilities you really need. fdisk has different versions.

Those non-dos images must be relatively new as I don't recall them either. :)

I thought maybe I would make some instructions for the linux challenged people who may be trying this.
I downloaded the WindowsME image because it has the latest version of fdisk which may help if you want to work with a larger drive.

1. Download winmec.zip from http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
It's located down the page abit in the section called Non-Windows Based Image Files W/Image app

2. Go to the folder where the image has been downloaded to and unzip it with the command:
unzip winmec.zip

3. Format a floppy disk with the command: mkfs.vfat /dev/fd0

4. Put the image onto the floppy disk with the command:
dd if=WINME.IMG of=/dev/fd0 which gives a message like this ...
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out

5. After the image is successfully copied over to the floppy, you may need to remove some less important files if you want to add something like bios tools.

Try the Ultimate Boot CD which can be downloaded from LQ

live long and prosper
floppy

Thanks for the replies guys. Bootdisk.com is actually where I started. The reason, though for my post is that all of the bootdisks for win95 are already a windows executable that self extracts and creates the disk itself thus making it non functional on a linux system. Otherwise dd would work. I know of no way in the world to use dd to create a bootable disk out of a self extracting windows executable. If there is a way, please post it here. Luckily, I was able to use a friends XP machine to reate the disk but I would still like to know for future reference if it is possible at all to create a win9x rescue disk from within linux. /peter

Homey, i have used this process many times on other items in the past but unfortunately, it won't work for EXACTLY what i was referring to. On the other hand, i am interested in knowing what this img has available. Is this just a custom rescue image? What programs come on the disk? /drum

It's just a standard Windows boot disk with cdrom drivers and some basic tools like editing, format, fdisk ... It comes in handy for people who want to upgrade the bios.