bodella wrote on 2025-07-14, 04:20:

Hey everyone, […]
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Hey everyone,

I literally feel like im about to have a mental breakdown from going round and round in circles trying to get something to work. I have a compaq portable 486c computer that turns on but nothing else after the disk check.

I’m currently trying to recreate the original 4 setup/diagnostic disks for the Compaq Portable 486c, which are delivered through a SoftPaq file: SP1971.EXE. (I think, if anyone knows the right softpaq please let me know)

What I'm Trying to Do:
I want to run SP1971.EXE and extract its contents to create 4 bootable floppy disk images (1.44MB each), just like the originals Compaq provided.

Once I have those .img files, I plan to write them to real floppy disks using my USB floppy drive and use them with my actual hardware.

What I’ve Tried So Far:
I’ve run FreeDOS inside QEMU and VirtualBox.

I mounted SP1971.EXE from an ISO and tried running it inside the VM.

I also created blank .img floppy files and attempted to write to them from within FreeDOS.

I formatted those images using format a: and verified they work.

But every time I run the SoftPaq, I get a "Disk failure" or "Drive not ready" error when it tries to write to A:.

My Current Thinking:
I suspect the problem is:

Either the SoftPaq doesn’t like virtual floppy drives in QEMU/VirtualBox

Or there’s something FreeDOS is missing that MS-DOS or a real DOS machine would handle properly

What I Need:
Would anyone here be willing to:

Run SP1971.EXE on a real DOS machine or reliable MS-DOS VM

Let it create the 4 floppy disks

Then dump them to .img files (e.g. using WinImage or dd)

And share those 4 disk images?

Once I have those .img files, I can write them to real floppies on my end and archive them for the community.

Thanks in advance — I’d really appreciate any help. If you’ve successfully created these disks before, even just advice would be welcome! Becqause im just stuck and confused at this point.

Sure, my softpaq extraction method uses Vmware player 16 with Windows 98SE, then winimage in there to save the data. I swear I used to be able to just copy out the .img file on the host OS but now I can't and winimage does the job well enough 😀

edit: huh looking at the images, disk 2 and 3 are the same? They're still the same when I've checked again so I'm pretty sure it's not an error on my part.
Hmm they have different checksums so they just look similar?