At 07:39 AM 4/11/1998  Cherri Krowten  wrote:
>
>        I will be upgrading the workstations on our Novell 3.12 network
from Win
>3.1 to Win 95.  Most of these workstations do not have a CD-Rom drive.  The
>latest flyer from CDW shows a backpack external CD-Rom drive for parallel
>port.  This seems to be an answer to the upgrade process.  I am not quite
>sure about installing Win 95 on the Server as of yet because of space on
>the HD.  Could anyone advise the amount of space Win 95 would take up on
>the server (space is a consideration at this point on our server).  Any one
>have experience with using External CD-Rom drives?  Fast or slow?  Good or
>bad?


Cherri

I have used an external SCSI on a Trantor plug adapter.
Works okay. You have to load the Trantor driver as well
as the CDROM drivers. You can boot from a floppy. If you
do it this way, it's faster to create a Win95 subdirectory
on your highest letter hard drive and copy the Win95
directory contents of the CD to that hard drive. Then run
setup from that hard drive. Retain the Win95 directory for
loading new drivers or fixing damaged files.

You could also copy the Win95 subdirectory to a ZIP drive
and load using that external drive.

The Win95 subdirectory in Win95a is 36MB or so. With
Win95b, it's more like 76MB.  Win98 it is like 128MB.

Since you are buying licenses and have a CD for each PC,
you are better off buying and installing a CDROM drive
for each system. You'll have to have a CDROM drive to
load most Win95 software these days, anyway.
Discontinued 4x models are $25. 8x are $45.

If you get a BACKOFFICE server, you can load across the
network. Or use GHOST to install across the network.

You have many, many other issues to consider besides
the actual Win95 installation device. Those other issues
will well decide your course of action.

Regards,

John Chin