Fresh Win95 install on 380ED

[Norway Pad]

I recently got my hands on a 380ED. Overall good condition, and I bumped the RAM up to 80Mb, which I think is max. It's got Win95 installed, but the install is dodgy and filled with stuff that no longer works. So for the fun of it, I want to do a fresh Win95 install from a cd I have. So I ended up with some questions, I hope there are people here who still remember procedures around the Win95 install on a Thinkpad..

• - I immediately ran into the issue with not being able to see the cd rom with the Win95 boot floppy, which was solved by using a Win98 boot floppy. Through the DOS prompt now available, I can see the contents on the cd, so I assume this will work. Or will it not work to install Win95 after having formatted and prepared the drive from the Win98 boot floppy? Do I instead need to modify the Win95 boot floppy with the driver for the cd-rom? And in that case, can anyone point me to that file? xxxx.sys? Or maybe someone even has a copy of the original boot floppy?

• - Maybe even more important: Does the standard Win95 cd contain all the drivers needed to actually make the Thinkpad work out of the box? I realized that the last time I did a Win95 install on an older 3xx Thinkpad (>15 years ago), I used the floppys and cd that came with the laptop. I do have the specific 380 drivers and system software from Lenovo's website, but that might not be of much use if, let's say, basic components like the trackpoint or the display won't work from the beginning.

• - I do have a Win98SE cd as well from back in the days, and I could theoretically be ok with running Win98SE on it. Does this OS run as good as Win95 on the 166Mhz / 80Mb RAM platform? This will of course solve the issue with the wrong boot floppy, but will it also solve the potential lack of drivers in Win95?

I have no other plans than just installing Office 2000 on it and just use it from time to time to make text documents. Otherwise the 380 is purely a collectible, so I see no point in trying to squeeze a newer and more usable OS onto it. Besides: This is also a project for fun.

Thank you for any answers!

[RealBlackStuff]

Given the choice, I would go with W98SE any time.
But try W95 with the Oak CD driver: http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/53 ... rom-drive/

[pianowizard]

I agree that Windows 98 Second Edition would be a far better OS than 95 on this machine. 166MHz Pentium and 80MB RAM are plenty for 98SE, though barely good enough for Office 2000 I think. I bet 98SE has all the drivers for the 380ED.

[automobus]

98SE does not have all drivers for 380D, I think it is missing proper graphics and audio. I expect the same situation with 300ED. PCMCIA did work, so it was easy to transfer drivers with a FAT CF card.

[Norway Pad]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

The boot floppy problem is solved. The driver file you pointed me to, RBS, has "an error in line 6" according to the text I got at boot. So I found a set of driver and mscdex.exe files on this site: http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files001.shtml, under "Universal IDE CD Rom Drivers" This one works, so I can access the directories of the Win95 cd when I am booted from the Win95 boot floppy.

For Office 2000, I still have the box, and it says minimum Win95 / 75MHz / 16MB RAM + 4Mb pr. application. But when I first installed that Office 2000 package many years ago, it was installed on a system with way better hardware specs than the 380ED. So we'll see.

[Norway Pad]

Ok, so the status so far is that the Win95 install is done. I chose to go with Win95 to restore the 380 to the state it was when it was new, and keep Win98 from a CF card as a potential project for later.

Anyway, no matter what OS I chose, there seem to be a lack of drivers, even with all the drivers from the Lenovo support site installed. There are still 3 unknown devices in the device manager, and since Win95 doesn't lists a Device ID for these components, I see it as potentially difficult to find exactly what they are. And I would not have any drivers to use for them anyway. I will have a further look this afternoon, but I see this as potentially stuck with the software I have access to at this point. As a last attempt, I can try Win98, as that might have some more hardware drivers included from scratch.

Edit: Removed unnecessary questions.

[Norway Pad]

Ok, same story as so many times before. I try to fix a problem, then I post the problem here, then I try even harder and do manage to fix the problem on my own. So the correct sequence is: Try, try harder, then post here.

Anyway, by trying to interpret the DMA and IRQs, I managed to find out that all unknown units were somehow connected to sound. So by updating and extracting the Audio driver files onto a floppy instead of trying to run the setup.exe, and with the addition of some vxd and drv files I found online, they are now fine.

So in case this thread comes up in a search, the problem is now fixed and I can give advice if someone run into this same problem.