Win 95 drive (fat32) as a Win XP slave? - Tech Support Forums

superguybob · April 12th, 2002, 10:11 PM

I am working on someones computer, and they came across a question that I wasnt quite sure about...

He bought a new machine running Win XP home. His old machine was running Win 95. Would it be possible to drop the old 95 drive into his new XP machine (set as a slave), and have it read it and possibly run any programs installed on it? I wasnt quite sure about it, although to me it doesnt sound feasible. Let me know...

storm2k · April 12th, 2002, 10:18 PM

yes, that's perfectly possible...

DLR37919 · April 12th, 2002, 10:24 PM

Most definately a drive is a drive.

superguybob · April 13th, 2002, 12:04 AM

Ok then, thank you much.

The main reason I was reluctant of the idea is that the Win 95 drive is formatted using FAT32 and the WinXP is NTFS.

Thanks

ND · April 13th, 2002, 11:09 AM

Does Win95 even support FAT32 ?!

AzKidd69 · April 13th, 2002, 11:17 AM

yea it will read the drive just fine no problem there... but the problem would arise in that any programs installed in windows 95 would probably NOT run properly unless they were reinstalled ( alot of times you can reinstall a program on top of itself to save space BTW) as for the data.. it works great...

and I think fat32 was implemented in Win95 OSR2

jmichna · April 13th, 2002, 01:31 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by superguybob
Ok then, thank you much.

The main reason I was reluctant of the idea is that the Win 95 drive is formatted using FAT32 and the WinXP is NTFS.

Thanks

The only real drawback is that no Win95 program (installed under Win95 OS in the drive's "prior life") will be able to "see" a file on the NTFS drive... it can not refer to any drivers, dlls, ocxs, etc., etc., that may get stored or installed on the NTFS partition. Also, since you would no longer be using W95 OS, all installed programs' registry entries would be gone.

Any programs re-installed thru the WinXP (NTFS) OS will work fine.

Why not just reformat the secondary drive, or convert it to NTFS?
jmichna

NDC · April 13th, 2002, 01:45 PM

Quote:

Would it be possible to drop the old 95 drive into his new XP machine (set as a slave), and have it read it

No problem... If you're luck, you may even be able to run Win95 installed on that hard disk by changng the boot sequence in the BIOS. However, because this is a different mainboard with different configurations, you may run into problems when the new hardware is detected...

Quote:

and possibly run any programs installed on it?

In many cases, no. This is because most Windows applications load dynamic link library files, common files, system files, etc., in the Windows and Windows sub-directories. If they are stand-alone versions, it should run just fine since the programs requires only the files in the application folder to run...

samwichse · April 13th, 2002, 02:09 PM

I've got Win95B (pre-OSR2) and it runs FAT32. I think 95A also used it. Still runs great (except the 9X memory leaks all over the place).