Do you have a USB LS-120 drive? If so, maybe you can try to write a bootable image to a diskette by using a utility that's intended for writing a bootable USB flash drive (Rufus, modern Rawrite32, and others like those). I've heard someone somewhere managed to make a bootable ZIP disk, and since those are a similar format (in terms of portability), a bootable LS-120 should be doable.

Relevant side note: Some motherboards allow using an LS-120 floppy drive as a boot device (I once had an Athlon XP motherboard with this option).

Off-topic: Post #586!

I tried using the integrated bootable diskette writing features as part of a few bootable packages, however, they too complained. I was going to try clonezilla, but that images was over 120 MB. I was going to look for some USB-based ones, but then I tried something that worked.

I put the LS-120 into my 486, which is running Win95c. The option to "format + write system files" was not greyed out, so I used this. It took a long time, perhaps 10-15 minutes, but the LS-120 diskette is now bootable. I've begun creating my new ultimate boot diskette with this LS-120 disk. Unfortunately, DOOM_SW and QUAKE_SW don't want to run off the LS-120. Perhaps some other DOS startup file I'm missing which was not written to the disk? Wolfy runs though.

I'm using an internal IDE LS-120 drive.

unless there is some compatibility layer i would expect it to boot like a hard disk;
whats the error message on those games?

C:\Quake_SW\quake
OMPT=: cannot open

For DOOM, it appears to be working today. Test system is a dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz, HE-SL chipset.

I made an LS120 super boot disk back in the late 90s/ early 00s. IIRC, I used Partition Magic and System Commander to setup and organise the disk. I had many OSes - Linux, Win2k, Win98 and BeOS, which would boot from the disk from a menu. The tricky part was hiding relevant drives with System Commander so that drive visibility wouldn't be messed up when the active OS was loaded.

You ran the OSes directly off an LS120 diskette? How can you fit so many OSes onto 120 MB?

Update: Even using my regular 3.5" floppy diskette to boot, then navigating to C:\games\Quake_SW\quake.exe results in the same error. Quake only runs if I boot to DOS from the HDD directly. I'm guessing there are some files Quake is looking for which need to pre-load w/DOS? If so, which ones?

set the path variable

feipoa wrote:

You ran the OSes directly off an LS120 diskette? How can you fit so many OSes onto 120 MB?

I had DOS on the LS120, but the other OSes were on multiple hard drive partitions. The LS120 was specifically prepared with a special boot menu. These days, I'd just run each OS from a removable hard drive caddy, and use different caddies insted of LS120s as removable media. Managing this is much easier.

j^aws wrote:

I had DOS on the LS120, but the other OSes were on multiple hard drive partitions. The LS120 was specifically prepared with a special boot menu. These days, I'd just run each OS from a removable hard drive caddy, and use different caddies insted of LS120s as removable media. Managing this is much easier.

Ahh. What happened to your LS120 dive? Dead?

mrau wrote:

set the path variable

Oh yeah, that did it. I'm not used to having folders on my ultimate boot disk, so path was not set at all. Nice catch! Working now.

feipoa wrote:

Ahh. What happened to your LS120 dive? Dead?

Yeah, it died a horrible death. Its power connector at the rear wasn't guided, so one day, this allowed the power connector pins to be slotted in upside down, and at power on - boom! Dead LS120.