I tried booting without a hard drive too and even that wasn't enough to get the computer to try booting from a floppy disk. The only thing I can think of is that this computer NEEDS a CMOS battery just to boot.

I managed to obtain a proper battery but it did not solve the problem, it is saving my CMOS settings but the system still will not even try to boot from a floppy disk. I tried both "use floppy first" and "use hard disk first" (the only boot options available) but either way it never tries to boot from floppy disk.

You can try installing dos on a new hard drive in a different machine and swap it into the laptop to see if it'll boot an OS.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-06-14, 21:12:

You can try installing dos on a new hard drive in a different machine and swap it into the laptop to see if it'll boot an OS.

Yeah, I'm not sure I have any other drives small enough to be recognized by this BIOS though. My smallest other 2.5" IDE drives are 800-something MB.

It couldn't hurt to try

I was able to get it to boot off a floppy disk by disabling the hard drive in BIOS (setting the hard disk type to None) so it does seem I'll need a new hard disk solution to actually use this laptop, as I can't boot off a floppy at all with the hard disk enabled.

So after a LOT of troubleshooting, I finally figured out the problem, and I'm embarrassed at how simple the solution was.

I noticed that if I set the hard drive type to "None" in the BIOS, the machine would boot off a floppy disk just fine. But that of course meant I couldn't use the hard drive.

So I checked the spec page for the hard drive (a Conner CP2044PK) and I noticed the jumper section, so I checked the jumpers on my drive...and my drive wasn't jumpered correctly for single drive/master operation!

Once I fixed that I was able to install MS-DOS 6.22 to the drive without issue, I'm embarrassed that I didn't check this sooner as I could have probably had this computer fixed months ago.

We've all been there my friend. I'm glad you were able to get it working now it's time to enjoy it.

Yeah! Well, it would be nice if I could get more RAM for it, 2MB is not a lot to work with.

I'm guessing it has a propriety ram module

Sure does, there were at the very least 2MB modules available (the 25Mhz model came standard with 4MB) but I've never found them on their own, only installed in other AST Premium Exec laptops.