I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0

I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.

On 09/07/2019 10.57, wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.


I don't think you can. You would have to install MsDOS first, which
means that you need a smaller hard disk because it can not support
modern sized disks. Then install Windows 3. And first find a floppy
drive, or clone an existing install.

One method would be to install using vmware player in real hard disk
mode, but emulating the floppy drive from the floppy images of the
installation floppies. Once you manage to install Windows that way, try
to boot that hard disk alone.

Or you could try to use freeDOS instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS#DOS-based_Windows

--
Cheers, Carlos.

"Carlos E.R." wrote:
On 09/07/2019 10.57, wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

[...]
And first find a floppy drive, or clone an existing install.

I expect the OP is having a little joke but you can (or could) get
a USB floppy drive to just plug & play. I have one, bought in the
early noughties.

wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.


Take your $300 6TB hard drive, and using an HPA,
clip it down to 2GB.

Then, have fun.

The 2GB will probably be one track on the disk drive.
The heads will never have to move again. Neat.

Use a USB floppy. A USB floppy can be A: or B: if the
chipset (SuperI/O) lacks a floppy controller.

There is at least one company making a solid state
floppy, for NC machines. Using that, there's no grinding
sound any more.

Paul

On 7/9/19 8:49 AM, Paul wrote:

[snip]

Take your $300 6TB hard drive, and using an HPA,
clip it down to 2GB.

2GB is the maximum file size under DOS (NT operating systems made that
4GB) on FAT file systems.

FAT allows partition sizes up to 2TB (use DOS 7.1 for FAT32). although
there might be some lower limit somewhere.

[snip]

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not
natural, but Devil's spells." [Martin Luther]

On 09/07/2019 19.42, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 7/9/19 8:49 AM, Paul wrote:

[snip]

Take your $300 6TB hard drive, and using an HPA,
clip it down to 2GB.

2GB is the maximum file size under DOS (NT operating systems made that
4GB) on FAT file systems.

FAT allows partition sizes up to 2TB (use DOS 7.1 for FAT32). although
there might be some lower limit somewhere.

[snip]

https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Probably this one applies:

BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit

At most 1024 cylinders (numbered 0-1023), 256 heads (numbered
0-255), 63 sectors/track (numbered 1-63) for a maximum total capacity of
8455716864 bytes (8.5 GB). This is a serious limitation today. It means
that DOS cannot use present day large disks.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 7/9/19 12:55 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

[snip]

Probably this one applies:

BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit

At most 1024 cylinders (numbered 0-1023), 256 heads (numbered
0-255), 63 sectors/track (numbered 1-63) for a maximum total capacity of
8455716864 bytes (8.5 GB). This is a serious limitation today. It means
that DOS cannot use present day large disks.

AFAIK, that isn't DOS but the BIOS in an older machine. Before that it
was 504MB. I currently have a couple of old (Pentium) machines with that
8.4GB limit.

These limits had to do with the 8-bit registers used to pass parameters
to BIOS. The original was:

CH = cylinder number (bits 0-7)
CL = sector number in bits 0-5, cylinder number (bits 8-9) in bits 6-7
DH = head number (never higher than 15)

That is, 1024*63*16 = 1032192. Since sectors hold 512 bytes, this is
516096K (or 504M). This was the limit at the time I first had a hard
drive ($300 for a 30MB drive).

Later systems used the high 4 bits in DH to specify bits 10-13 of the
cylinder number, so you could have 4096 cylinders (over 8GB).

At one time DOS did have a 32MB limit (FAT had a 16-bit "number of
sectors" field). This limit was in effect when I first got a hard drive.

DOS 4 (or DR-DOS 3.4) added a "huge" version of FAT16 that used 32 bits
for this field. 32 bits allows 32^2-1 sectors (2TB), a limit not
reachable until FAT32 introduced with DOS 7.1 (supplied with Win 95B and
Win 98).

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can
sweeten his coffee with a pickle." -- Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible
Worth Reading And Other Essays

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/07/2019 19.42, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 7/9/19 8:49 AM, Paul wrote:

[snip]

Take your $300 6TB hard drive, and using an HPA,
clip it down to 2GB.

2GB is the maximum file size under DOS (NT operating systems made that
4GB) on FAT file systems.

FAT allows partition sizes up to 2TB (use DOS 7.1 for FAT32). although
there might be some lower limit somewhere.

[snip]

https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Probably this one applies:

BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit

At most 1024 cylinders (numbered 0-1023), 256 heads (numbered
0-255), 63 sectors/track (numbered 1-63) for a maximum total capacity of
8455716864 bytes (8.5 GB). This is a serious limitation today. It means
that DOS cannot use present day large disks.

The BIOS limit and the DOS limit are two different things. As long as
the BIOS can access *part* of the disk to boot the OS, the running OS
can use disk drivers which circumvent BIOS limitations [1] and (as
mentioned) a FAT32 filesystem, much, much larger than 8.5GB. (Depending
on the sector size, FAT32 could go as high as 2.2 to 17.6TB (yes, 'T')
per volume/partition.)

See for example what the FreeDOS [2] Wikipedia page says about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS

"File systems

FAT32 is fully supported and is the preferred format for the boot
drive.[41] Depending on the BIOS used, up to four Logical Block
Addressing (LBA) hard disks up to 128 GB, or 2 TB, in size are
supported.[42] There has been little testing with large disks, and some
BIOSes support LBA but produce errors on disks larger than 32 GB; a
driver such as OnTrack or EZ-Drive resolves this problem."

[1] Such as Disk Manager from OnTrack, EZ-Drive from Micro House and
even SpeedStor from Storage Dimensions.

[2] FreeDOS is not applicable to the OP's 'needs', because it
doesn't/can't (fully) support Windows 3.x, but MS-DOS offers similar
functionality, especially in the 7.0/7.1 versions.

On 7/9/19 3:57 AM, wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

Format the disk. You won't be able to format your system drive while Win
is running, so you need a bootable disk. Most Linux systems allow you to
boot and use it without installing (and have a partition program called
GParted).

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

There are external 3.5-inch floppy drives that connect through USB.

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.

Did you get internet access with it?

BTW, I do have a Win 95 installation (which is on a VM). For some
strange reason, I wanted to see what MSIE 1.0 was like (and it won't run
on anything later). Network access didn't work until I remembered what I
did in 1995.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not
natural, but Devil's spells." [Martin Luther]

Mark Lloyd wrote:

wrote:

I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

"Andy Burns" wrote:
Mark Lloyd wrote:
wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Do you get wafers with it? (M. Python reference)

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.

On 09/07/2019 19:18, Apd wrote:
Presumably he's taking the ****

Don't be silly. He hasn't got a penis to take the ****. He is wearing
a urinary catheters so that urine can be removed from the bladder.

Path: aioe.org!.POSTED.JklRYy2o/xEwaeLrGoENRQ.user.gioia.aioe.org!not-for-mail
From: "Apd"
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-10
Subject: I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100
Organization: ad hoc
Lines: 15
Message-ID:
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: JklRYy2o/xEwaeLrGoENRQ.user.gioia.aioe.org
X-Complaints-To:
X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200
X-Priority: 3
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
Xref: aioe.org alt.comp.os.windows-10:94866






--
With over 999 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100, "Apd" wrote:

"Andy Burns" wrote:
Mark Lloyd wrote:
wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Do you get wafers with it? (M. Python reference)

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.

I found Windows 3.5 to be the best.

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100, "Apd" wrote:

"Andy Burns" wrote:
Mark Lloyd wrote:
wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Do you get wafers with it? (M. Python reference)

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.

I found Windows 3.5 to be the best.

Nah. Windows 1.11: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/wi...%3Aoverviewtab [grin]
--
Quote of the Week: "It's kind of an insane case ... 6,000 ants dressed up as rice and robbed a Chinese restaurant." --Steven Wright
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
/ /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100, "Apd" wrote:

"Andy Burns" wrote:
Mark Lloyd wrote:
wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Do you get wafers with it? (M. Python reference)

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.



Please don't mix up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 3.11. They
were two very different things. Windows 3.11 was a very minor upgrade
to Windows 3.1; the primary difference was that Windows 3.11 contained
a few extra drivers.