Steps to installing Windows 95OSR2 on a machine with no CD-ROM drive

I've got a few machines with no CDROM drives that need OSes put on them (mostly laptops).  Here's how I do it.

Required materials:

• 1 floppy disk
• Win95B CD
• PC with CDROM drive and serial port
• null modem cable (cheap on ebay)

Note that it would be faster if you used a parallel transfer cable. I've never used one but I've been told it's called a "null parallel cable" and you  can get them on ebay. The performance could be as much as 10 times higher, so it might be worth looking into if you do this a lot.

Steps

Prep files:

• From the Win95 CD, copy the folder with all the cabs in it to your hard drive
• Delete files we won't need (remember serial transfer is slow):

setup21i.exe
setup32.exe
wowkit.exe
cs3kit.exe
(these files just allow you to install AOL or Compu$erve)
• You should end up with a folder that has less than 50MB of data in it.

Prep target machine:

• Make a Dos bootdisk (format a:/s), and copy format.com and fdisk.com to it.
• Boot target machine with floppy.
• Fdisk its hard drive "fdisk"; delete old partitions, make a new one. Note that drivespace3 does not support fat32 drives so if you want to compress your disk you need to make an old-fashioned fat16 partition. Keep in mind that Fat16 maxes out at 2GB per partition, and at that size each file takes a multiple of 32k. 

Transfer (with Zip2.2):

Zip2.2 is a nice, more or less free, program for Transferring files between win9X machines and DOS machines. It does not work with XP or 2K. As an alternate option (if you can find it) Lap Link 5 can be used in place of Zip22; it's faster, more fault tolerant, and more user-friendly. But it's commercial and long ago taken off the market. Doesn't mean you can't find it; try looking for ll5.zip...

• Download a copy of Zip 2.2 ("zip22.zip", a null modem transfer app by Eric Meyer (search for null modem on this page) and place it on the boot floppy as well.
• Connect two machines with null modem cable.
• Format its hard drive "format c:".
• Start zip on target, make sure it is set to the right port, and put it in server mode.
• Start zip on host, set it to create folders (under options), and Send the contents of the cab folder to the target machine.
• Wait a while (about two hours) for transfer to finish. Did I mention that serial transfer is slow? But it's better than floppies, folks.

Transfer with Zmodem:

If you use a WinNT based OS you can't run zip. Instead use HyperTerminal (which comes with all versions of windows I've used) on the Windows size, and a DOS based Zmodem client on target machine. I recommend Conex (local download here). I would the windows install files it as one large zipped file. The comm settings I used which seemed to work well were 115200 8-N-1, Hardware Flow Control.

Install:

• Change directory to the folder where you copied the files and type "setup".
• Setup takes a while; about an hour on a P200, for instance. Near the end of "copying files…" (98%) setup will try to install AOL and Compu$serve. Since you deleted them, you will have to tell Windows to skip those files.
• Windows still manages to install some online services even after we deleted them from the setup folder; feel free to delete them as well after the install concludes. You should be able to get Win95 to install in less than 100MB of space fairly easily given these steps.

Note that if you already have Windows on the machine, you will need to delete or rename its win.com file in order for OSR2 to allow itself to be installed.

Conclusion

Now that you have Win95b installed, use Ethernet to share your other machine's CD-ROM drive and install the rest of your software that way. It's much quicker than serial networking.  But if you must, you should know about the DCC option. That's Direct Cable Connection, which allows two Windows boxes to share folders and drives over parallel and serial cables, much like if you used a Ethernet connection. It can be tricky to set up; be sure that both machines have netbui installed or it will fail mysteriously. Do a google for direct cable connection windows for websites with lots of info on just how to get it to work.