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Scenario

I have four PC's in the spare bedroom. My wife thinks it's excessive but that's another story. Three are networked so backing up and transferring files is easy. The 90 MHz DELL runs DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and I have not been able to network it to the others. I don't know why as after hours of effort using two different LAN cards I have failed but again, that is another story. If I could "double-up" my Win 95 PC to also run DOS/Win 3.11 I could make do with only three PCs and solve file sharing problems.

Plan1. Multi-Booting seemed the answer. Everyone talks about it and we read about it in nearly every PC Magazine we come across. Partition Magic we hear a great deal about. All true no doubt but I wanted something simpler that did not rely on a working version of Win 95,98 or 2000 to access a boot manager. So I dug up an article from PC Direct, January 1999 which I had cut out in case I would one day wish to try it. Explains how to install Windows 3.x onto a system which already has Windows 95 already installed and then dual-boot. I followed the instructions and ended up with a corrupted Registry. FAT16 versus FAT32? I do not know.

Plan 2. The next plan involved installing Windows 95 onto Windows 3.11 but the system wouldn't let me until I renamed win.com to win.old. Installed Win 95 and renamed win.old back to win.com again. This time I lost everything when I tried to run Win 3.11. Had to format the drive and start again.

Plan 3. I downloaded a boot manager from the internet. Again I had to format the drive. (FDISK /MBR did not repair the hard drive boot sector.) To be fair it was probably designed to boot between UNIX and DOS. Also Hard drives have changed a lot so probably do not act in quite the same way as a 40 MB IDE would for example.

Plan 4. I got Fed-up with trying to doing it with software so I thought two hard drives and a switch would do it. I could then boot to Win 95 or DOS/Win 3.11 depending on which way the switch was set before powering up. The drives do not have to be identical if the BIOS is set to "AUTO" but it slows booting up and is less reliable. I already had a Seagate 1.2 GIG so I bought an identical one from an online auction for £11 (about $16) including postage. Luckily the difference between the Master and Slave was just adding or removing one jumper. Instead of jumpers I inserted two LED connectors from an old motherboard. These were soldered to a two way switch. Windows 95 worked fine but DOS just did not want to know because it has to boot from an "Active" partition or hard drive. Ok, so I set it to the DOS drive and booted with a floppy. FDISKed it, set the active partition and rebooted. No good. DOS will not tolerate two active partitions (Win 95 doesn't seem to mind).

Plan 4b. Supposing I told the BIOS not to recognize the slave drive (except when I want to backup the DOS/Win3.11 drive with Win 95 of course). Success this time.

So I now have a PC in which Win 95 can recognize the DOS/Win3.11 drive but not the other way round. Good enough for my purposes and simple enough that a problem on one OS would not affect the other one.

Note to Remember When Formatting and FDISKing in this Project.

   DOS 6.22 will only recognize hard drives of up to 500 MB. To get round this boot from a Win 98 start-up disk. FDISK and format the drive but do not use the /s switch to make the drive bootable. Then use a DOS start-up disk and give the "sys c:" command to make it bootable. The reasons for this are:-
1.    Will recognize disks bigger than 500 MB.
2.    Win 98 system files will display a Windows 98 splash screen when booting. Most confusing if nothing else.
    Surprisingly, Win 98 FDISK and DOS 6.22 system files seem to work well together.

Why Windows 95?

I wanted Win 95 for legacy support. there are a few programs that will not run with anything else. Also some hardware is no longer supported. The company has gone bust or they would rather that we bought something newer. Either way drivers are not being written for these items. A case in point was a brand new joystick I bought from a well known electronics catalogue. You know the sort, looks like it came out of an F-16. About the same price as a two button version. Tried it with Win 98 and it would only operate with two buttons. Performed well I must admit but not to its intended potential. With a spare Win 95 system it should no longer be a problem.