Dead in the water at what stage? Does the drive start spinning and say 'Starting Windows 98...'?

Simplest solution - why not try to get a bootable "OEM" 98SE disk?

"extracted" ??? How ?? You cannot extract (like with 7zip) the floppy image contents to a floppy disk and have it bootable. You need WinImage or other proper software to "write"the image to a floppy disk.
Otherwise the boot sector will not be written making the it unbootable.....

Horun wrote on 2023-09-28, 01:19:

"extracted" ??? How ?? You cannot extract (like with 7zip) the floppy image contents to a floppy disk and have it bootable. You need WinImage or other proper software to "write"the image to a floppy disk.
Otherwise the boot sector will not be written making the it unbootable.....

I had no clue. I appreciate that. I will download the application and write a proper image to the disc. Coping the full .iso gave me a “not enough space” error. So I extracted it. I will try this next. I apologize for my lack of experience but I’m just jumping into this. Thank you all for the the quick replies.

Yeah that sounds like your problem there, you cant extract it like you you have to write it to the floppy disk otherwise the boot sector files wont be written as boot sector files.

wutang61 wrote on 2023-09-28, 01:25:

Horun wrote on 2023-09-28, 01:19:

"extracted" ??? How ?? You cannot extract (like with 7zip) the floppy image contents to a floppy disk and have it bootable. You need WinImage or other proper software to "write"the image to a floppy disk.
Otherwise the boot sector will not be written making the it unbootable.....

I had no clue. I appreciate that. I will download the application and write a proper image to the disc. Coping the full .iso gave me a “not enough space” error. So I extracted it. I will try this next. I apologize for my lack of experience but I’m just jumping into this. Thank you all for the the quick replies.

No problem ! Hope you get it to work. If not let us know, that is why we donate our time here to help others learn from our mistakes 🤣. We were all once (and in some ways still are) new to a lot of this 😁

Okay so Winimage on scene. Multiple disc write verification failures.

“Disc error on track xx head 1”

I can ignore them all but the retro system will state “invalid system disc”and fail to load DOS. So I’m assuming this isn’t a good floppy. Nor to the other 10 seem to be from the new package I bought.

Tried an unconventional format via CMD to no success.

Is it possible your drive is bad? Floppy drives are complex mechanical things, they don't necessarily age particularly well...

Honestly, I would just advise you to
1) Get a bootable ISO version of Windows 98SE, or
2) You seem to already have the installation files on your CF card, so why not put the CF card in another machine, boot the Win98 SE floppy in a virtual machine (e.g. using VirtualBox), attach the CF card to the VM (which I assume can be done - you need it attached so the VM can see the boot sector), do a sys c:, remove the CF card, put it back into your retro machine?

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:30:

2) You seem to already have the installation files on your CF card, so why not put the CF card in another machine, boot the Win98 SE floppy in a virtual machine (e.g. using VirtualBox), attach the CF card to the VM (which I assume can be done - you need it attached so the VM can see the boot sector), do a sys c:, remove the CF card, put it back into your retro machine?

Actually, the more I think about it... isn't it possible to get "MS-DOS 7.1" booting off a CD or a flash drive with some trickery? All you need is that sys c: ...

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:30:

Is it possible your drive is bad? Floppy drives are complex mechanical things, they don't necessarily age particularly well... […]
Show full quote

Is it possible your drive is bad? Floppy drives are complex mechanical things, they don't necessarily age particularly well...

Honestly, I would just advise you to
1) Get a bootable ISO version of Windows 98SE, or
2) You seem to already have the installation files on your CF card, so why not put the CF card in another machine, boot the Win98 SE floppy in a virtual machine (e.g. using VirtualBox), attach the CF card to the VM (which I assume can be done - you need it attached so the VM can see the boot sector), do a sys c:, remove the CF card, put it back into your retro machine?

Isn’t a bad idea. I guess I could mount both the USB floppy drive (assuming the FD is good) which one of which I copied old photos off of and reformatted to make a boot disc. So I’m fairly confident that it’s good. I have no idea why the image software is going ballistic with track errors.

Also attempted to use a self driving .exe from allbootDiscs to no success. 18 million errors of access denied and more track errors.

Sounds stupid, but I wanted to install the stuff the “old way” using the standard boot floppy method.

Can’t believe it’s being this difficult although I’m sure user error is partly to blame.

Next thing I could do I guess is burn a OEM .iso to a CD-R and try to install it completely from the CD drive. Figured it was easier to just copy the installation files to the CF and have them install locally from the same disc. But nothing is easy is it?

Making a bootable USB with Rufus or equivalent. isn’t something I’ve played with. I’ll admit that will take some research on my part. A bootable floppy with fdisc seemed like the easiest way to get my feet wet with these older platforms

wutang61 wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:48:

Sounds stupid, but I wanted to install the stuff the “old way” using the standard boot floppy method.

Can’t believe it’s being this difficult although I’m sure user error is partly to blame.

Next thing I could do I guess is burn a OEM .iso to a CD-R and try to install it completely from the CD drive. Figured it was easier to just copy the installation files to the CF and have them install locally from the same disc. But nothing is easy is it?

Well, this is the issue with retro anything. Reminds me of something I read a few months ago about the Union Pacific steam program - many of their challenges have to do with the fact that, unlike 70 years ago, the infrastructure for supplying a steam engine is... gone. So whereas water, parts, etc would have been plentiful in the 1950s, now, well, they're not... and that creates significant operational challenges for them.

And this is the same thing here - if you were trying to do this in 2000, you could buy brand new high quality floppy disks anywhere and, if your floppy drive went bad, you could go down to the nearest computer store and have your choice of multiple models of brand new, recently-manufactured drives. And if you needed to make an "MS-DOS" boot disk, put the floppy into any machine, fire up the ol' command prompt, format a: /s, boom, done. Try doing that with your neighbourhood Windows 11 machine...

The copy the installation files to the CF card method should work fine, except you need to do that sys to get the boot sector and the barebones "MS-DOS" onto the CF card. Or... I guess you don't technically need that, but you need to be booted from somewhere else to run the installer off your CF card.

My view is that you have two options:
1) Get MS-DOS 7.1 booting off something random/weird/modern/etc, or
2) Spend a lot of time trying to acquire other floppy drives, disks, etc for testing.

You can also burn a bootable Windows 98/ME cd (make sure version is booteable!), and when it boots to the cd menu it will either give you the option to install Windows or boot into dos.

If you manage to copy the i386 folder of the Windows setup into the CF card and launch the setup process via this command prompt it will do the trick.

Did it multiple times with a SFF pc with no floppy that I have and no problem at all 😀

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-28, 04:09:

Well, this is the issue with retro anything. Reminds me of something I read a few months ago about the Union Pacific steam progr […]
Show full quote

wutang61 wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:48:

Sounds stupid, but I wanted to install the stuff the “old way” using the standard boot floppy method.

Can’t believe it’s being this difficult although I’m sure user error is partly to blame.

Next thing I could do I guess is burn a OEM .iso to a CD-R and try to install it completely from the CD drive. Figured it was easier to just copy the installation files to the CF and have them install locally from the same disc. But nothing is easy is it?

Well, this is the issue with retro anything. Reminds me of something I read a few months ago about the Union Pacific steam program - many of their challenges have to do with the fact that, unlike 70 years ago, the infrastructure for supplying a steam engine is... gone. So whereas water, parts, etc would have been plentiful in the 1950s, now, well, they're not... and that creates significant operational challenges for them.

And this is the same thing here - if you were trying to do this in 2000, you could buy brand new high quality floppy disks anywhere and, if your floppy drive went bad, you could go down to the nearest computer store and have your choice of multiple models of brand new, recently-manufactured drives. And if you needed to make an "MS-DOS" boot disk, put the floppy into any machine, fire up the ol' command prompt, format a: /s, boom, done. Try doing that with your neighbourhood Windows 11 machine...

The copy the installation files to the CF card method should work fine, except you need to do that sys to get the boot sector and the barebones "MS-DOS" onto the CF card. Or... I guess you don't technically need that, but you need to be booted from somewhere else to run the installer off your CF card.

My view is that you have two options:
1) Get MS-DOS 7.1 booting off something random/weird/modern/etc, or
2) Spend a lot of time trying to acquire other floppy drives, disks, etc for testing.

I’ve gone through my own hell of this trying to get older mechwarrior titles to function on newer hardware. It’s hours of beating your head on the table. Most of the “hardware” I’ve lucked out with. I don’t believe the drives are the issue. The floppy drive is fairly new for a floppy drive. 2008. CD drive is from 2009.

I feel it’s an issue of the media. No doubt bad sectors are on these floppies and this data is much too sensitive to tolerate it. Who knows the quality of the boot image files I’m attempting to use ether. I think the best course of action at this point
Is to hit up Amazon for some CD-R’s and burn an OEM ISO (bootable) to it and go about it that way. At least once I have a working OS I can write a legit boot floppy from within windows to eliminate that variable.

The goal of this little build is have it compatible all the way back to 95 OSR 2. Being tied to USB boot media breaks that compatibility. Granted I don’t know how this chipset will tolerate 95. As 875 is very close to the last of the last from Intel with any driver support for 98.

wutang61 wrote on 2023-09-28, 04:23:

I’ve gone through my own hell of this trying to get older mechwarrior titles to function on newer hardware. It’s hours of beatin […]
Show full quote

I’ve gone through my own hell of this trying to get older mechwarrior titles to function on newer hardware. It’s hours of beating your head on the table. Most of the “hardware” I’ve lucked out with. I don’t believe the drives are the issue.

I feel it’s an issue of the media. No doubt bad sectors are on these floppies and this data is much too sensitive to tolerate it. Who knows the quality of the boot image files I’m attempting to use ether. I think the best course of action at this point
Is to hit up Amazon for some CD-R’s and burn an OEM ISO (bootable) to it and go about it that way. At least once I have a working OS I can write a legit boot floppy from within windows to eliminate that variable.

The goal of this little build is have it compatible all the way back to 95 OSR 2. Being tied to USB boot media breaks that compatibility.

Well, you can always get one of those USB floppy emulators. There's a lot of specialized gear like that nowadays...

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-28, 04:32:

wutang61 wrote on 2023-09-28, 04:23:

I’ve gone through my own hell of this trying to get older mechwarrior titles to function on newer hardware. It’s hours of beatin […]
Show full quote

I’ve gone through my own hell of this trying to get older mechwarrior titles to function on newer hardware. It’s hours of beating your head on the table. Most of the “hardware” I’ve lucked out with. I don’t believe the drives are the issue.

I feel it’s an issue of the media. No doubt bad sectors are on these floppies and this data is much too sensitive to tolerate it. Who knows the quality of the boot image files I’m attempting to use ether. I think the best course of action at this point
Is to hit up Amazon for some CD-R’s and burn an OEM ISO (bootable) to it and go about it that way. At least once I have a working OS I can write a legit boot floppy from within windows to eliminate that variable.

The goal of this little build is have it compatible all the way back to 95 OSR 2. Being tied to USB boot media breaks that compatibility.

Well, you can always get one of those USB floppy emulators. There's a lot of specialized gear like that nowadays...

Oh definitely. I’ve seen it around. I just need a little motivation to get creative once the damn thing boots for the first time and I get drivers installed.

He might have a system that doesnt do el-torito booting. (Cant boot from cd)

What he should do in that case, is burn his .iso to a cd, and put it in the tray, then use the win98 EBD to boot the system and get cdrom access through dos.

He can get a disk image of the EBD from bootdisk.com

http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Without a diskette drive, it may be problematical, but them's the breaks.

An LS120 internal drive on an ide->sata adapter will give a 'floppy drive' on a modern system. Winimage can make use of it.

wierd_w wrote on 2023-09-28, 04:39:

He might have a system that doesnt do el-torito booting. (Cant boot from cd)

An Intel-branded i875 board from 2003? How would you have installed XP (which was the OS it would have been designed for) on it without CD-ROM booting? (Wasn't NT 4 the last version of NT designed to be booted off floppies to kick off the installation?)

XP has a 'bootstrap from floppy' install method. 😉

It's a 6 floppy set, that starts the 'mini-nt' environment needed to use the setup cdrom.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/f … 04-b782ebf6987d

Via wayback: msdn kb page on the subject.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040204011850/ht … b;EN-US;q310994

If, however, you don't feel like hunting down and writing 6 disk images to real media... one can always try plopboot (from a single floppy) instead.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/plpbt.bin.html#runflp

Bonus: you can use plopboot to bootstrap booting from usb, on systems that otherwise can't do that as well!

As for 'I need media!'

One can still get 3.5" diskettes.

https://www.amazon.com/Office-Diskettes-Forma … _df_B000NKHIS4/

It's the 5.25" diskette that's hard to obtain.

The platform is capable of supporting all modern boot methods. Including USB. That isn’t the issue. It would take windows 7 32bit if I wanted to suffer that experience with a 3.2 P4 and a maximum of 4GB of ram. SATA and all.

I’m sticking with legacy interface for the initial setup. At least long enough to get chipset drivers installed and clone the installation to keep this easier next time around. No reason to inject more problems than absolutely necessary.

Ordered a flash drive, Floppy emulator, and some CD-R’s.

If anyone can personally vouch for links to known good ISO’s for boot disks and OEM (self installing) 98se I would greatly appreciate it.