VOGONS


First post, by fjk61011

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I have a PCd-4H 486sx with overdrive chip. I also have a Win 95 floppy image. The image boots under VirtualBox but when I expand it to a floppy it won't boot on the PC. What am I doing wrong?

I have the original floppy disk that came with the Win 95 but it is damaged.

Reply 1 of 9, by konc

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1) Can the 486 boot from any other floppy disk?
2) How do you "expand" the image to the disk?

Reply 2 of 9, by fjk61011

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konc wrote:

1) Can the 486 boot from any other floppy disk?
2) How do you "expand" the image to the disk?

I'll check the floppy drive later. The PC is in the attic and I'm a bit lazy today. I have a few others that I never used so I'll be able to experiment. I have Win 98 that came with a Dell PC that I no longer have and I never kept the product key.

I tried WinImage and MagicISO to write the image .

Reply 3 of 9, by ik777

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Magic ISO. It looks you just double click and drag and drop all files to drive A, right?

This should be do "Copy Disk" Run winimage and find it.
Source is your boot image, target is your floppy drive. No drag and drop.

Reply 4 of 9, by konc

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Yeah, this is why i'm asking. Make sure that you use something like winimage to "write" the image on the floppy, not just transfer the files. You can ensure that the floppy is correctrly written if you actually try to boot from it in virtualbox. Not the image file as you've already done, the actual floppy disk from the host machine's drive a:

This way you can be 100% about the floppy and investigate what's wrong with the 486 in case you still cannot boot...

Reply 5 of 9, by fjk61011

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I can boot from a MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk in the floppy drive of the 486.

The Win 95 disk gives an error "No system disk found". I'm betting there is a simple mistake I'm making.

I'm thinking of putting MS-DOS 6.22 on the 486 and using my backpack cd ROM drive to install Windows 95.

The backpack runs on a PS/1 386sx with a Cyrix 486sx installed.

Reply 6 of 9, by konc

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That's excellent, it means you just have to create a proper win95 boot floppy image and nothing else is wrong. Start with WinImage 😉

Reply 7 of 9, by fjk61011

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I've managed to write a boot floppy with DiskWrite

Reply 8 of 9, by fjk61011

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I've written a win 98 image to a floppy. The floppy boots up under virtualbox. The 486 has no boot from cd option so I'll try with the 98 boot disk

Reply 9 of 9, by fjk61011

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I'm up and running with Windows 95 on the 486.

I put MS-DOS 6.22 on the 486 and used my backpack CD ROM drive to install Windows 95. I didn't need the Setup floppy which I used DiskWrite to write the image to the floppy.

The weak link in all of this is the USB floppy drive. So to get the Win 95 image to the floppy disk, I formatted the floppy on the PS/1 and then used DiskWrite on that floppy in my main PC

Next task is to connect the 486 to the network.