Boot disk is Microsoft Windows 95 OSR2 - Boot Disk (Dell OEM) (3.5-1.44mb) and is mounted to Floppy Drive 1 (A:)
Windows 95 ISO is Microsoft Windows 95B (4.00.1111) (OSR2) [English] and is mounted to CD-ROM drive (D:)
I was able to run FDISK to set up a DOS partition and format the hard drive (C:) without issue. I then ran SETUP. SCANDISK confirmed that there were no issues with the drive. Then I got the line "Copying files needed for Windows setup" and... the installation process hung up there. For several hours. Obviously, something had gone wrong, and it was never going to end.
While troubleshooting online, I found a post that suggested copying the contents of the Windows 95 CD to the hard drive and running SETUP.EXE from there. I was able to do this (verifying that the drive is properly formatted) but I still got stuck on the "Copying files needed for Windows setup" step. Any recommendations for what I should try next?
Windows 95 originally didn't support FAT32, limiting partition sizes to 2GB. OSR2 added FAT32 support but I dunno if the installer still properly supports it or not. I would bet the issue is related to that. You could try limiting the partition size to under 2GB and see if that helps.
Any reason not to use Windows 98SE for this? It would very likely not have this issue but games would work just as well.
And yes, when installing any Win 9.x, you want to to always copy the installation files to the hard disk first and run the setup from there. The main reason is that after the first reboot the system might not yet have the correct driver for the CD drive but it still needs access to the installation files to continue.
Not particularly. I just kind of picked 95 because I figured it would be the best fit for the era of games I had in mind. I'll give 98 a shot. Thanks!