OSR2 Hangs After Booting Previous Operating System

After starting your previous operating system (by pressing F4 when you see the "Starting Windows 95" message, or by choosing Previous Operating System from the Startup menu), when you exit the previous operating system session, your computer stops responding (hangs) when you restart the computer.

This problem occurs with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2). Windows 95 OSR2 is designed to be preinstalled on new computers only, and cannot boot back into Windows 95 from a previous operating system.

To enable the computer to boot Windows 95 OSR2 again, the boot drive must be made bootable with the Windows 95 OSR2 Emergency Boot Diskette. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Insert the Emergency Boot Diskette in drive A and restart the computer.
2. At the command prompt, type the following line:
   sys c:
3. Remove the boot disk and restart the computer.

Because OSR2 is preinstalled on new hard disks, there is no option to start the previous operating system on the Startup menu. However, if you format the hard disk, install MS-DOS and then Windows 95 OSR2, and then boot the previous operating system, you experience the problem described in this article. Booting a previous operating system is unsupported in OSR2.

If you need to reformat the hard disk for any reason, use the Emergency Boot Diskette.