Could be a bad cable issue or board has issues. You need to get booting from a floppy working before trying to boot from CD. How do you get 100MB ram ? What size memory sticks do you have ?
Can you post some pictures of the motherboard ?

Horun wrote on 2021-01-03, 15:59:

Could be a bad cable issue or board has issues. You need to get booting from a floppy working before trying to boot from CD. How do you get 100MB ram ? What size memory sticks do you have ?
Can you post some pictures of the motherboard ?

it's not exactly 100 mb, I was summarizing. The system reported 98-sumthin and i rounded up.

I didn't think about bad cable but I did think I had the cables backwards so I tried reversing them, to which the system wouldn't even POST until I flipped the cables back. I'll try different ribbon cables when I get home. The one connected to my 3 inch drive is a 3 inch 5 inch combo, if that makes a difference. The LED on all the drives turn on.
Also another thing I didn't try was mess around with the CPU dip switches, I didn't want to mess it up and break it. I assumed the previous owner knew what they were doing more than me and I didn't want to mess up the CPU voltage stuff ( but maybe I should anyways accordingly to the manual).
When I get home I'll take a pictures of the board and send it.

I have made a few changes since I originally got it, such as replacing the ISA video card and other stuff I thought I wouldn't need ( maybe thats my screw up)

Here's photos of my motherboard over the important bits, if there's a specific spot let me know and I'll take another like of the drives.
As for the exact amount of memory :
Base Memory 640k
Extended memory 97280k
Cache Memory 256k

I've tried switching out several different cables and that too didn't work. I can show photos of my BIOS settings if you want to see that too, I didn't see anything that jumped out as a potential issue but again I'm not overly familiar with bios systems older than XP.

98304 KB is 96 MB (96 x 1024 KB)

I can't help with your problem though, sorry.

remove all the ram, down to 1 stick, then try booting. if that doesnt work try another stick of ram.

Von Bon wrote on 2021-01-03, 18:14:

I have made a few changes since I originally got it, such as replacing the ISA video card and other stuff I thought I wouldn't need ( maybe thats my screw up)

Did it boot up proper before you made any changes ? List the exact changes you made so we know what was replaced.
AND what is that card sitting in the tan slot ? It is not a regular PCI slot. Pull that out of there and put a regular PCI video card in the White PCI slots.

Horun wrote on 2021-01-04, 05:27:

Von Bon wrote on 2021-01-03, 18:14:

I have made a few changes since I originally got it, such as replacing the ISA video card and other stuff I thought I wouldn't need ( maybe thats my screw up)

Did it boot up proper before you made any changes ? List the exact changes you made so we know what was replaced.
AND what is that card sitting in the tan slot ? It is not a regular PCI slot. Pull that out of there and put a regular PCI video card in the White PCI slots.

Actually that color's caused by the angle of the flash on the phone with the video card. It is as white as the other PCI slots. Since the time I have posted the photo I have switched it with a ISA video card because the FX for some reason was becoming unreasonably hot to the touch.
I was not able to do any boot tests when I acquired the machine, only POST tests and boot into BIOS, and it was able to pass that with the previous hardware and the changes. Just cannot make it boot any OS or any Boot Disks.

I cannot remember the exact specifics, but it originally had two sticks of RAM ( I do not remember if it was the Double-Sided memory ones or the Single).
And it did not have originally a PCI video card, but it did have a ISA Video card but I cannot remember which one, I have two of them (I think one is 1 or 2MB and the other 4MB, my memory is sketchy).
There may have been other ISA cards, I shall go look for those in my hardware container. My memory is terrible but I know for sure one of them was for a network connection which I wasn't going to need so I took it out.
I think I remember there being a ISA Audio card that the CD Drive was connected to... I think the primary reason I took it out because it looked like the caps on it were not well. And I wanted to minimize as much possible old-hardware failures by not having to deal with uncertainties.

Warlord wrote on 2021-01-04, 02:26:

remove all the ram, down to 1 stick, then try booting. if that doesnt work try another stick of ram.

I forgot about doing that. At first when I did this, I wasn't getting it to POST at all, dealing with the usual beeps of upset memory. Eventually after some experimenting and double-checking the manual for the motherboard, I have discovered that I have been using the RAM in the wrong way. It turns out I have 2 Double-Sided and 2 SIngle-Sided 30-Pin SIMMs or... such ( apparently there's EDO, DIMM, FPO, I have no clue. The sticks have no labels.).
Anyways the manual suggests not to load both types, even though it posted with all 4. I removed the single-sided sticks into the proper slots and it booted proper at 64mb of RAM.

Further update on things :
I went about taking the floppy out and inspecting the pins on it, gave it a bit of clean and I notice the pins on the far right weren't exactly straight, maybe I screwed up in putting the cable in. So I bent them proper and fit the cable in before sliding it back into the machine to double-make-sure the cable was in proper.
And this actually had a noticeable change ( or in combination with the RAM change) where it now actually reads the floppy drive and giving me a read error or boot not found. Which was tremendous progress as it indicated it read the disk to even confirm if it was on there.
So thinking that things were dandy I plugged the CD Drive back in and then.... before it would try to boot, and after POSTing.... the computer gets stucks and hangs at "Verifying DMI Pool Data".

if its working without the cd drive than your cd drive is bad. or you got it plugged in wrong.

I can't say it is working yet. I haven't gotten it to boot anything after removing the Disc Drive and still getting stuck at Verifying DMI Pool Data. Except Once. One boot up it Updated the DMI Pool Data successfully and then it got stuck. After a reboot...... stuck at DMI Pool Data

Okay, switched the Flopy Drive and finally got the message : "Starting MS-DOS..." We have a boot. I'm rushing to edit this before waiting for it to finish but am glad it is finally doing something.

Thank you all of you who responded. Hopefully there aren't other issues and this thing is able to boot up DOS. Still flashing underscore but I'll give it time. I'll seek for a disc drive.

Okay yeah, I can't make it boot anything still @_@ and DOS gets stuck at "MS-DOS is Starting" and then it hangs.

How are you creating the boot disks? although the fact you get "Starting "MS DOS" message would suggest your doing it correct.
maybe a bad disk? run scandisk on it from your other computer
or maybe bad floppy drive? temporally swap it with the drive from the PC your creating the boot disk with.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-01-04, 09:21:

How are you creating the boot disks? although the fact you get "Starting "MS DOS" message would suggest your doing it correct.
maybe a bad disk? run scandisk on it from your other computer
or maybe bad floppy drive? temporally swap it with the drive from the PC your creating the boot disk with.

I use a HP USB Floppy Drive connected to my modern computer. When I first did all this, I went the path of 98SE. So I used 7-Zip to open the boot disk image and shoved all the contents into the floppy and then burned the install CD.
As for the DOS ones, its kinda similar. Found a site with version 6 and 6.22 and a community 7.1 (which was what I was after with 98SE as an extra bonus).

So process is overall the same : Copy the contents of the image files of the Boot Disk into a floppy, and likewise to the other disks.
If there is some special format option then I do not know it. At my job I found a backup copy of Win98SE Boot disk as well as BU disks of Win 3.1 Setups. Also all those met with no results.
Out of desperation to get something working, I found WinImage but I don't think I used it correctly? (Looked no different than just manually putting all the files in the disk)

I don't know the optimal settings and formats for the 3.5 disks. And I certainly don't have any 5 inch boot disks to desperately try.
As for the type of floppies, they are memorex and generic 2HD (off the top of my head) 1.44mb, IBM/PC formats I believe.

To make a disk bootable you need to write to the boot sector, simple copy and paste wont do this.

From a dos prompt you can specify a system disk by typing format a: /s
or to copy the system files from 1 disk to another say floppy to your hard drive sys a: c:

If you don't have another dos/win9x pc you can go to somewhere like here and use the automatic boot disk option which is like a self contained WinImage file.
https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html

Windows 3 disks aren't bootable so not surprised that doesn't work. Win98 disk should of worked though, you can try booting off that on another PC to see if the disk is ok, alot of more recent machines still support that.

🤣 go get a 98 boot disk from winworld or somthing, or download a trial version of winimage and make your floppy bootable with it.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-01-04, 16:43:

To make a disk bootable you need to write to the boot sector, simple copy and paste wont do this. […]
Show full quote

To make a disk bootable you need to write to the boot sector, simple copy and paste wont do this.

From a dos prompt you can specify a system disk by typing format a: /s
or to copy the system files from 1 disk to another say floppy to your hard drive sys a: c:

If you don't have another dos/win9x pc you can go to somewhere like here and use the automatic boot disk option which is like a self contained WinImage file.
https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html

Windows 3 disks aren't bootable so not surprised that doesn't work. Win98 disk should of worked though, you can try booting off that on another PC to see if the disk is ok, alot of more recent machines still support that.

How do I deal with Window Error N.5? It's so annoying and most people say to only insert the disk when it asks and not before but thats not working either.

*sigh*
Nothing I can do will make WinImage work without errors such as "Disk Error on track 1, head 0 Floppies do not match" and its too much a coincidence that all my disks would be bad. Of the two different types, the Memorex are less cheap feeling/looking 2SHD IBM Formatted 1.44MB.

Using allbootdisks doesn't work either as window 10 just throws errors.
Maybe I need a new USB Floppy Drive.

why not just install a Virtual machine since you run win 10, you can put win 2k or xp on it and use its usb arbiter to share your usb floppy as a drive in the VM. then run win image on that. 🤣 BTW part of your problem might be that they are 2mb formated floppys and your usb flopp doesn't have compatible firmware. But XP should be able to quick format that to standard format.

Also since you said you can boot from the CD have you even tried buring like a windows 2000 cd to see if that worked.

your floppy drive could be bad but just as likely most of your problems are becasue of win 10 🤣 winimage doesn't work on win 10

Try this utility instead
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

Warlord wrote on 2021-01-04, 22:48:

why not just install a Virtual machine since you run win 10, you can put win 2k or xp on it and use its usb arbiter to share you […]
Show full quote

why not just install a Virtual machine since you run win 10, you can put win 2k or xp on it and use its usb arbiter to share your usb floppy as a drive in the VM. then run win image on that. 🤣 BTW part of your problem might be that they are 2mb formated floppys and your usb flopp doesn't have compatible firmware. But XP should be able to quick format that to standard format.

Also since you said you can boot from the CD have you even tried buring like a windows 2000 cd to see if that worked.

your floppy drive could be bad but just as likely most of your problems are becasue of win 10 🤣 winimage doesn't work on win 10

Try this utility instead
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

Virtual Machine might have to be the option.
And, no, these are 1.4MB floppies, they are labeled and only support the one format. Windows doesn't have an issues reading and writing, it was just WinImage which I thought would be a tool to format the disks into bootables.
Also no, I didn't say I could boot through CD, the CD Drive was causing issues.
But I'll try your suggestions, such as VMing one of them and using them to create a boot disk. Makes me curious if DOSBOX can do that 🤣
Gonna also try the diskimager. Will report back tomorrow on any changes.