Non-system specific win95 image for installs

[MrCookie]

I am thinking about creating a windows95 image that I could copy onto a freshly formatted hard drive, so that upon its first boot, it would be able to either finish installing itself, and matching the hardware components
or be complete except for a few missing hardware specific files, that upon booting it would look for new hardware, and repair itself accordingly.
Any ideas?
Which files/folders would I delete to create an image so that I could take a hard drive out of one machine, and put it in another, and have windows rebuild itself to match the hardware...

 

[AndyHui]

It's not something that is pratical to do, or particularly successful. Win95 installs pretty quickly....most of the time actually taken is in the hardware detection phase anyway....which you would need to do with the image once it is dumped onto the new system. The amount of time saved is not significant, and the method that I have kicking around in my head still requires at least 2 reboots to get it working properly.

Once the image has redetected all the hardware, you would need to install video card drivers and stuff like that as well: remember that Win95's driver library is much smaller than Win98 or Win98SE.

What you can do is create a fresh installation without installing any special drivers, ie video card, sound card, stuff like that. Then what you need to do is delete all the entries in the Registry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ENUM key just before you create the image. Delete all the keys, then immediately reboot into DOS mode and create the image using Ghost or something.

After dumping the image, the first boot will detect some of the hardware, with more hardware being detected on subsequent reboots. You might even need to go into the Control Panel and Detect New Hardware just to get everything recognised.

Hope that helps.

 

[MrCookie]

Thanks for getting me started.
What I am looking to do, is installing win95 and a few pieces of software on a hard drive(A), then deleting the system specific configuration files, so that when I rebuild a system I can use DOS to copy the contents of drive(A) to the drive(B), and then be able to start-up the computer with drive(B) with minimal time spent.

In other words, create an image on drive(A) that can be redily copied to any drive, and have Win95 reconfigure itself to match the hardware.