Hello fellow Windows 3.1 fan (an/or disgruntled users)! Windows 3.1 was the very first OS I ever used way back when I was in kindergarten, and I've used it more than any other OS except for Windows XP (or possibly Damn Small Linux, but not sure).

Anyway, I could definetly say that I'm an expert at installing Windows 3.1 as I've done it probebly 20 different times on a variety of different systems, but I've always wanted a portable version of it that I c`ould carry around on some portable device. Of coruse, that would require running DOS on that device and so far, I've only run DOS off of hard drives and floppy disks (hard drives aren't portable and floppies can't hold win3.1), but recently I found a CD image for a bootable DOS CD. So I burnt that to a disk and tested it. It worked fine, but then I tried to put the WINDOWS folder from win3.1 on it, and my computer insisted that the CD was full, even though the sum of the DOS files on it was just about 1MB.

Well,I aksed my more computer savvy friend and he said that once you burn a CD image to a CD, the computer believes that the CD is only the size of the uncompressed files. :(

But, he told me that it was posible to make your own bootable DOS CD, but it involved making an image of a bootable DOS floppy disk. I don't have any computers at the moment with a floppy drive (I primarily run Win3.1 on a DOS emulator), so this method will not work for me.

I'm not asking you to make me a bootable CD with Win3.1 on it (thoguh if you could I would really apreciate it), but I am asking for more information on making a bootable Win3.1 CD. All I need is a bootable DOS CD which I can actualy burn Windows 3.1 onto.

Any help would be greatly apreciated!

May the Force be with you!
-NEWK

CDs are read only, so of course the disc is "full" no matter what.

Check your burning software documentation, creating bootable ISOs from a floppy disk or disk image should be covered there - or try searching, as there are ready made ISOs available for download.

Experimentation is fine, but a little self directed research is better. Every so often someone "comes up" with this idea, but it requires a certain familiarity and 'expertise' beyond your own meagre accomplishments (no, installing Win31 a few times does not really qualify you as an 'expert')

"and floppies can't hold win3.1"

... and that's not really true either - there have been a few stabs at running Win31 from a floppy disk, and it is possible (after a fashion)

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Windows from a Floppy:

PeepHole

Mini-Windows

The basic premise is to create a RAM drive, as there is insufficent room on a floppy, and a CD cannot be written to

Running Windows from a RAM disk

Google is your friend

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You can also do what we used to in the old days, and do a network install. You can trim windows on the floppy to 14 kb, and run the binaries off the cdrom.

See my instructs at bootland, zb

http://z3.invisionfree.com/Boot_Land/index.php?showtopic=38

The dream you dream alone is only a dream,
The dream we dream together is reality.

Ok, I didn't intend to sound (quite) so disparaging - my point is: Win31 has been around for a very long time - while it is possible that you will, on your own, come up with some new & interesting way to operate this old GUI, it's not terribly likely - even less so until you are a bit more familiar with various computing concepts.

You can learn from what has already been accomplished, and maybe even improve upon it - but the one thing those folks have done that you don't seem to have (yet): they've 'done the work' - ie: research & experimentation.

Great ideas are... well, great, but they need to be tempered with some portion of realism

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I built a copy of windows on the cdrom back in 1997 (when i had a cdburner). I used it for many years, it was specifically designed to use the same binaries to install or use on a ram-disk run.

When you use a ramdisk, the windows binaries stay on the cdrom (eg s:\), and the files are set up on the ramdisk (eg r:\ via xmsdsk). The ramdisk install is 140k, which compresses with removed binaries to a 14k rar file.

Set the base by administrator install, ie "setup /a". This expands the files, and places them read only. This will become s:\windows.

Set up the ramdisk install via "setup /n", this creates a small ramdisk with the files.

One should remember that in the times of win31, there were diskless workstations, which used a network or floppy boot to a:, and then used a ramdrive to get windows running under the user profile.

So, running windows 3.1 without a hard drive, is something we were doing way back in 1992 and since.

The dream you dream alone is only a dream,
The dream we dream together is reality.