Windows 95 Retail
CD-ROM Edition
Since I looked at a lot of Windows 95 installation media and
also collected many as well, I'll try to clear things up a little with actual
facts.
First let's clear up what is "retail upgrade" and what is "full
retail": upgrade required the user to own an existing copy of MS-DOS 3.31
or later, Windows 3.0 or later, or OS/2 2.0 or later. If you don't prove your
eligibility to an upgrade, setup would not let you install Windows 95 (but this
can be quite easily bypassed, see below). Full retail, on the other hand, does
not have such restrictions, allowing you to perform a clean install.
The retail part of the name means the product was sold packaged in a box in a
retail store to anyone. This is contrasted by OEM releases, which were licensed
to the hardware manufacturer for inclusion with their hardware, meaning these
copies were not allowed to be sold directly to the end users (althought as you
can imagine, some people broke this rule anyway). This was indicated by the
"For distribution only with a new PC." label on OEM installation
media. As a side note, OEM Service Release 2 and later of Windows 95 were only
available as an OEM release (as the name obviously implies).
The type of installation media is called a product type and there's 9 of them
defined for Windows 95, of which only 7 appear to have actually been used.
- 1: Microsoft internal -
doesn't require a product key of any kind
- 2: Retail CD upgrade -
requires a 10-digit product key and a qualifying product (MS-DOS, OS/2 or
an earlier version of Windows) for upgrade
- 3: Retail floppy upgrade -
requires a 10-digit product key and a qualifying product for upgrade, will
check for user information in the bootsector of disk 2 and write it there
- 4: Retail floppy full -
requires a 10-digit product key, will check for user information in the
bootsector of disk 2 and write it there
- 5: Unknown -
requires a 10-digit product key. This behaves the same way as type 6, and
I've never seen it used on actual installation media of any kind, which
leads me to suspect it's entirely unused or was possibly reserved for
future use. Maybe this product type was to be used by a planned full
retail CD release, but as said, no media has been found so far that
actually uses it.
- 6: Unknown -
see type 5 above.
- 7: OEM Preinstallation Kit floppy -
This does not seem to ask for any product key, but will check for user
information in the bootsector of disk 2 and write it there. This is a rare
media type that was used by OEMs to preinstall Windows 95 onto their
computers, the product type is also often overriden with a different one
on actual media (see below for how this works).
- 8: OEM floppy full -
requires an OEM product key, will check for user information in the
bootsector of disk 2 and write it there.
- 9: OEM CD full -
requires an OEM product key.
The ProductType parameter
is defined in the file SETUPPP.INF inside the PRECOPY*.CAB chain
on the installation media. You can easily override it by placing another
SETUPPP.INF with a different ProductType (or other parameters you want to
change) in the root of the installation source directory. There's also a CCP parameter
in SETUPC.INF, which determines whether or not an upgrade
eligibility check will be performed for upgrade product types. Finally, there's
an OEMUP parameter in SETUPPP.INF, which converts a full OEM
release into an upgrade one, which will still accept OEM keys but can be forced
to perform an eligibility check with CCP=1. Althought OEM upgrade media was
clearly an option, I can't say for certain whether or not this combination was
actually ever used in practice.
Reference - http://www.betaarchive.com
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