Getting an old PC to boot from floppy \ VOGONS

Getting an old PC to boot from floppy

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First post, by Arkas

Posted on 2017-10-31, 16:49

Arkas Offline

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I have been going down the road of nostalgia lately. I have a Pentium CPU running WIN95, it recognized the boot drive but does not see an OS on it.
There is no option to boot from the CD drive which would have made life much easier, however, there is a boot from floppy. No USB support either 🙁
Assuming I find a floppy somewhere at home, what do I need to do to make bootable so that I can check the hard drive and try to fix things. I have no idea where my old WIN95 disks are.
Thank you!

Reply 1 of 7, by Arkas

Posted on 2017-10-31, 16:57

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Just adding some info:
The HDD is set to master and the CD to slave in the configuration.

Reply 2 of 7, by .legaCy

Posted on 2017-10-31, 17:24

.legaCy Offline

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Well if you find one floppy you can go to any w9x and format /s a:
However i really recommend to buy one GOTEK floppy emulator, you can transfer files with ease between modern computer and your vintage computer.
Its cheap and realiable.

Reply 3 of 7, by Arkas

Posted on 2017-10-31, 17:35

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Thanks but that would format the drive without giving me any of the errors found. I remember ages ago, there was a CHKDSK program that did this, but I'm too 'old' to remember.

Reply 4 of 7, by Arkas

Posted on 2017-10-31, 17:44

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Found this site, and although it claims it's a 1.44MB drive compatible, on the right it shows as 3.54MB!
MS-DOS 6.20 at WinWorldPC

Last edited by Stiletto on 2020-03-02, 07:33. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 7, by Arkas

Posted on 2017-10-31, 17:49

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Well I found a 1.44MB FD. Since I didn't think ahead, I dont know how I am supposed to burn am image of it since my computers no longer support FD!!
Ready to throw the towel. Sorry everyone bout my ranting.

Reply 6 of 7, by retrocanada76

Posted on 2017-10-31, 18:05

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there are external USB 3 1/2 floppy drives easily found on eBay. Caution must be take if you are targeting 720KB disks are not all these support 720KB, but 1.44MB you are ok.

Then plug into your modern PC (it works on windows 10!), format, copy a floppy image of DOS using Win32Disk or WinImage, etc

Reply 7 of 7, by chinny22

Posted on 2017-11-03, 15:02

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So yeh you have 2 options.
Get a USB Floppy drive for a modern PC, You will also need to get some disks.
Both the drive and disks should be cheap, but disks are not known for reliability
Or
Get a Gotek Floppy emulator off ebay, not that expensive and you can just use a USB stick.
You can download software on the modern PC to write to the USB stick in "Gotek language"

In both cases you will want to goto bootdisk.com and download the Win95 bootdisk.
How you write the image file will depend on which option you choose.

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