As we’re still waiting with our new Raspberry PI 2 for Windows 10 to be released, why not run a slightly older version of Windows in the meantime? Here’s a guide to setup Windows 3.x on your Raspberry PI B2. Please note that you will need Windows 3.x for this. If you have a MSDN subscription you can download it from Microsoft. Bing or Google might be able to help you further when you do not have an MSDN subscription. Let’s get starting with getting Windows on Raspberry PI

Requirements

Before starting with getting Windows on Raspberry PI, we assume you have the following hardware:

• Raspberry PI 2 model B (with cable/Wi-Fi network connection)
• Micro SD card (big enough to run Raspbian)

Also you have installed on your PC:

• Win32DiskImager
• WinSCP

And you have the following files ready:

• Raspbian image
• Windows 3.x setup files

Preparing Windows 3.x

When you have the original Windows 3.1 or 3.11 from MSDN, you have downloaded a self-extracting executable. I have no idea why this is since you need Windows to run the executable…

• Run the executable on your PC and extract the files to a new folder. The result should be somewhere around 612 files (386MAX.VX_, 8514.DR_, 8514FIX.FO_, etc. etc.).
• Place all the files in a compressed zip file. In my case I called it “win.zip”.
• Upload this zip file to your OneDrive, email it to your webmail or place it somewhere else where you can access it from the internet. You’ll need to obtain it later on your Raspberry.

Setting up Raspbian

• Insert your Micro SD card in your PC and format it as FAT32.
• Use Win32DiskImager to write the Raspbian image to your SD card.
• Insert your Micro SD card in your Raspberry, connect network, a HDMImonitor, keyboard and mouse to it and finally attach the power source. If it all went well you will see Linux booting up and open up a BIOS like configuration screen.

  

• In the menu first choose “Expand Filesystem”. This makes Raspbian look what disk space is available besides from the size of the image that we wrote to the SD card.
• Then choose the third option, “Enable Boot to Desktop/Scratch”. Set it to boot to the desktop, this is the easiest location to get Windows to run.
• Optionally you can explore the other options like setting your localization right, enabling the camera, overclocking etc. When done select “” to close the configuration tool and reboot the PI.
• In the Desktop environment we start by opening an LXTerminal window (the icon that looks like a monitor).
• In LXTerminal enter the following command to make sure your OS is fully up to date:

[snippet id=”2070″]

• Then install DOSBox with the following command:

[snippet id=”2069″]

• After DOSBox is installed the next step is to transfer Windows to your Raspberry. You can download the file we prepared before with the Epiphany web browser.
• Now we go back to the terminal window to create a dos/windows location and extract the zip file: (replace the filename “win.zip” by the name of your downloaded zip and mind the capital D in Downloads)

[snippet id=”2068″]

• That was enough Linux stuff, open the menu, click on games, DOSBox
• We now need to mount (last Linux command, I promise) a C:\ drive with the following command:

[snippet id=”2067″]

• Now the Dos folder is our C: drive!
  Start the windows setup by entering:

[snippet id=”2066″]

• Windows will now start the installation 🙂

  

   

You will now have Windows on Raspberry PI, We want to thank Ruben Middel for this awesome guest post on WindowsInstructed on how to get Windows on Raspberry PI!