Packard Bell Master Restore CD

After installing a new 4GB CF card as HD replacement in the Packard Bell, I’m attempting to restore the original Windows 95 OS with Packard Bell extras from the Master CD

Archive.org has a great collection of original Packard Bell install discs, the Windows 95 group is here: https://archive.org/details/windows95mastercd

My first attempt is with the “170889 – Win95 (Jan 1997 – Platinum Pro) – VM.ISO” disc, which I’ve kept a local copy of online here: https://xyplex.net/files/Packard_Bell/Master_CDs/

Install notes:

• This generation of PC doesn’t support booting from CDROM, so a boot floppy is used. The boot floppy image is osboot.img in the root folder of the CDROM
• The boot floppy has CD-ROM detection and drivers for various CD-ROM drives that PB used. However, our original CD-ROM drive isn’t working and I’ve replaced it with a newer generic IDE ATAPI CD-ROM drive which isn’t recognized by the boot floppy. To workaround this, I copied the generic OAKCDROM.SYS driver to the floppy and edited the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to use this driver. [more details to come on how to do this]
• After my first install, the hard drive did not boot. I booted back to the floppy, ran fdisk, and had to set partition 1 to be the Active partition.
• Windows 95 COA (Certificate of Authenticity) code needs to be entered in Win95:
  • Packard Bell COA Product ID: 35296-OEM-0017501-47172