The board in question is an ELAN-104NC, something I picked up on eBay a number of years ago and that has laid in the 'must get around to doing something with that' box in my workshop (it's a frikken big box!)


Anyway it boots from a 1.44" stiffie and here's where the fun begins. Of the only SEVEN disks I could find despite scouring the ends of the workshop and house, I couldn't get a single one to format

After an hour scouring the interweb I found a utility that wrote a DOS 6.22 boot file sequentially to the disk and it was small enough to fit without hitting the 78% limit I was faced with. So good so far.
The I dug out the smallest HDD I could find (10Gb) that I hooked up to a spare WinXP PC and booted that PC using the floppy to transfer the DOS system files to the 10Gb HD (after fdisk-ing the HDD to 2Gb partitions

After making up a 20-pin header to connect a VGA display I finally got the single board computer to boot. Success!
Then it was back to the WinXP machine to transfer a (legit) copy of Win95 - another gem from the 'too good to throw away box' - to a partition on the 10Gb disk, slap it back on the SBC and reboot to watch Win95 load in under 2 minutes!
Out of curiosity I navigated to the Windows 95 installed folder to discover the install was a total of 8Mb


No wonder the frikken thing FLIES!!!!
When was the last time you loaded software that was under 100Mb, never mind an operating system of only 30Mb




Anyway I'm chuffed to have this SBC up and running but forgot how primitive DOS command line working was - I've yet to (re)discover the delights of Win95 and Visual Basic 5.0.
Anyone else into the older PCs and operating system? Compared to todays 'switch-on-and-go' systems the older OSes were hard work!