So that's the last piece of the puzzle to make this work: When I doubleclick the "Boot Debian" shortcut, Windows sees that it's a DOS program set to run in MS-DOS mode, so it shuts down Windows, then runs it in native DOS. Now that it's pure DOS, it can overwrite DOS with Linux
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And this VM, being very pristine (nothing is installed on it other than Win95 itself and a video driver to give me 256 color mode) it shuts down VERY FAST, giving the illusion that I just loaded Debian Linux right on top of Win95.
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How to do this is explained in the Loadlin+Win95/98/ME HOWTO, written in 2001 by Chris Fischer: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Loadlin+Win95-98-ME.html …
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The more realistic way you'd do this is by using DOS's multi-configuration mode to let you select if you want to start Win95 or Linux at boot time, as explained by the guide:pic.twitter.com/IPnwLK6fk1
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But that's boring and not as much fun. So when I learned about the Fun Way of launching it from inside Win95 by setting up a MS-DOS mode shortcut, I had to try it.
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But yeah. Here's an example of Windows 95 exiting to DOS mode and then starting windows back up: You'll notice in this configuration, it doesn't actually "restart", even though it calls it "restart in DOS mode"pic.twitter.com/KeJHqlQgf2
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I think the way this works is that Windows 9x does some checks on the DOS environment before it loads, and figures out if it can run in some kind of clean-mode. If so, the restart-in-DOS-mode option is actually a "shutdown Win95, reload DOS environment" mode
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but you'll find that if you have certain DOS device drivers installed (ones that Windows doesn't know if it can unload and restore), it'll actually reboot the computer here, instead of just loading DOS back up.
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basically it does that when it can't be sure that DOS will function properly. And it's important to remind here: Windows 95 is not running "on top of" DOS. DOS is not loaded or running when Win95 is running.
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Windows 9X/ME doesn't run on top of DOS. It's not a shell. It just uses DOS as a loader, and it can integrate with many DOS things (like device drivers) if necessary, but it it does that using Win95 code and a form of DOS emulation.
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Windows Me tried so hard to remove the misconception of Windows running on top of DOS that somebody at Microsoft OK'd the idea of auto running ScanDisk (after unclean shutdown) *after* Windows entered multitasking GUI mode. Restarting after each disk write. Good times...pic.twitter.com/zjwlTcDU7S
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