Windows 3.1 upgrade

Im working on an old 386 computer. I'm not real sure about the components in the computer, but i do know that it has 8 meg of ram and a 400+ mb hard drive. The drive is also connected to a controller card that is plugged into an expansion slot on the motherboard. Now here's the problem...

The computer orginally had dos and windows 3.1 installed on it. I then upgraded it to windows 95 and only installed minimal components. Now the computer gets a blue screen every now and then. The message says something about another device trying to access the hard disk drive in an illegal manner. (or something along those lines) My guess is it's because of the controller card in the machine and windows 95 is not liking it. I was wondering if i formatted the drive, and reinstalled just a fresh windows 95, would i need to worry about device drivers for that controller card, if so, would there be any? Also the computer has several other cards in it. (sound card, video card, etc). I'll probably need drivers for them too. Is it plausible to format and reinstall 95? Ideas?

 

YOu would still need the drivers for that card and they are more than likely not native to Win95. You might be able to find them on driverguide.com if you know the make and model of the controller

 

Can you post the EXACT error message you are getting? I have a similar setup with a controller card, running windows 95 and I didn't need to do anything special.....95 picked it up and installed it as a standard ide/esdi hard disk controller.

 

I haven't seen the error message lately, but if i get it again, I'll post it:

Here's the situation that surrounds the computer:

The gentleman that owns the computer brought it to me and asked if i could find him some video rental software to help with his local grocery store video rentals. I told him i would. I found him the ideal software, showed it to him, and he was tickled. The only problem is, he neglected to tell me that the computer had dos and windows 3.1 on it. I told him to get a copy of windows 95 and i would put it on there for him. He did. I put windows 95 on, and the computer used the drivers it had available. I left the computer running for about 3 hours and came back to check on it. It was then that i got the first blue screen. Like i said the message said something about another device trying to interact with the hard drive in an illegal manner. (If i get the actual error, i will post it...sorry ) I then pressed a key to see if windows would come back. It did. This procedure repeated for about 3 more times, with an interval of about an hour between each blue screen. Sometimes windows would come back, sometimes it wouldnt. The only problem with this is, the gentleman is going to put the computer in his store. And if it is going to be used to keep track of customer records, then i dont want him losing any data. The program has a backup option built into it and it works fine. The only thing that really worries me is if they dont backup till the end of the day, then their data for that day will be lost and need to be re-entered.

I would appreciate any suggestions on this topic, or ideas on what to do next. Thanks.

 

Well, from my experiences with older (386 and 486) computers, the 8mb of ram is more than likely the biggest problem, windows 95 must certainly run VERY slowly at best. How much free space is on the hard drive?

Also, without knowing the error message, it's kinda hard to know what's going wrong......but I've worked on them in the past, so I'll stick with you if you can get the error message......