Have you tried installing the games in MS-DOS mode (by pressing F8 before the Windows splash screen and selecting "Command Prompt Only")? Chances are your copy of System Shock doesn't like being installed in an MS-DOS prompt (just a suggestion, not sure whether or not this is true).

As for Ultimate Doom, do you have another system with a floppy drive that you can install it on? My guess is if the disks aren't causing the problems either you need to get your laptop's floppy drive cleaned or your hard drive may be dying, have you ran Scandisk on your laptops hard drive (you've stated that you've "ScanDisk'd all of them" so I'm assuming you meant the floppies you bought and not including your hard drive)?

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Have you tried installing the games in MS-DOS mode (by pressing F8 before the Windows splash screen and selecting "Command Prompt Only")? Chances are your copy of System Shock doesn't like being installed in an MS-DOS prompt (just a suggestion, not sure whether or not this is true).

As for Ultimate Doom, do you have another system with a floppy drive that you can install it on? My guess is if the disks aren't causing the problems either you need to get your laptop's floppy drive cleaned or your hard drive may be dying, have you ran Scandisk on your laptops hard drive (you've stated that you've "ScanDisk'd all of them" so I'm assuming you meant the floppies you bought and not including your hard drive)?

I do have a Windows XP rig with a floppy drive, and that's really it, and yeah, I only Scandisk'd my floppy disks. I forgot to mention that I did happen to get SEAL Team (EA, 1993) to install directly through the prompt though using its' floppy disks.

I booted my laptop in MS-DOS mode and got Shock to the installation screen, but immediately there was another file read error that popped up during the installation, so I tried Ultimate Doom and it said the same thing it did last time.

So I then booted up my WinXP machine and I was able to fully install Ultimate Doom from the directory, and the game worked fine, while I still got the same file read error with Shock (just a reminder, ScanDisk said it was perfectly fine...), even though I properly mounted it and stuff through DOSBox.

At least I definitely know that there's either a floppy drive problem or a hard drive problem, but I really don't know what to do at this point. I think it's more of a floppy drive problem, because each one of my CD based games installed perfectly, however, yet again, I'm not sure, as my machine still has its factory 3.2GB IDE hard drive, and those things are known for going AWOL.

And just an update, the ScanDisk won't do a thorough check with my hard drive, and even in Safe Mode, it keeps restarting, but no error on a standard check...

dickkickem wrote:

as my machine still has its factory 3.2GB IDE hard drive, and those things are known for going AWOL.

And just an update, the ScanDisk won't do a thorough check with my hard drive, and even in Safe Mode, it keeps restarting, but no error on a standard check...

If your laptop supports CD booting, you can use any one of the hard drive diagnostic tools from the Ultimate Boot CD to thoroughly scan your hard drive.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

dickkickem wrote:

as my machine still has its factory 3.2GB IDE hard drive, and those things are known for going AWOL.

And just an update, the ScanDisk won't do a thorough check with my hard drive, and even in Safe Mode, it keeps restarting, but no error on a standard check...

If your laptop supports CD booting, you can use any one of the hard drive diagnostic tools from the Ultimate Boot CD to thoroughly scan your hard drive.

I did what you said and used MHDD 4.6, as the other ones were saying "Not enough memory to decompress image."

It seemed to scan all the sectors was fine, as nothing was said after the scan. Since my Fujitsu hard drive has SMART, I searched through the SMART attributes, and this is what I got:

I don't know if this is good or not, I only got half a clue to what this means. Is my hard drive aight?

Can you get a hold of Hirens Boot CD and try a surface scan of your HDD using HDAT2? Use Hirens version 15.1 here:

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/hbcd-v151/

scroll down to the bottom of the page for download link and burn from another PC to a CD not DVD im guessing your laptop does not have a dvd drive and boot from this CD and choose HDD tools from memory and then HDAT2 will be at the top also try a test of your memory with the same Hirens CD but with Memtest 86+ and try changing the settings for memtest when the program starts with "C" is says it at the bottome of the screen for the letter

I agree, Hiren's Boot CD is quite good. I'm using it from time to time, too. 😀

Something else, though: The crash in the second picture isn't that unusual.
DOS/4GW is a Protected Mode Extender and is meant to be run from pure DOS, not from within Windows 9x.
It may work from there, but that's not always guaranteed.
Also, the "professional" version is not quite the same as the regular version of DOS4/GW.
Maybe it contains some internal differences-

Last, but not least, please remember to keep your floppies write-protected if Windows 95/98/Me is running.
Otherwise it might damage/alter the boot sectors to some degree.
See http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-ihc-damage/

Jo22 wrote:

I agree, Hiren's Boot CD is quite good. I'm using it from time to time, too. :) […]
Show full quote

I agree, Hiren's Boot CD is quite good. I'm using it from time to time, too. 😀

Something else, though: The crash in the second picture isn't that unusual.
DOS/4GW is a Protected Mode Extender and is meant to be run from pure DOS, not from within Windows 9x.
It may work from there, but that's not always guaranteed.
Also, the "professional" version is not quite the same as the regular version of DOS4/GW.
Maybe it contains some internal differences-

Last, but not least, please remember to keep your floppies write-protected if Windows 95/98/Me is running.
Otherwise it might damage/alter the boot sectors to some degree.
See http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-ihc-damage/

I got a read error on my System Shock (2nd pic) during the middle of my installation through DOS mode. IDK why.