The same thing happens on two of mine, with both FlashFloppy and the regular Gotek firmware (though I haven't tested both combinations). The drive reads in Windows but just won't boot from it, even though the drive shows its doing a floppy seek on boot. I honestly think I've damaged them at this point.

Thanks for the thread link, maybe the HxC firmware is worth the cost? I'll have to have a read through the thread to try to understand what's going on. I think it's also certain motherboard combinations make a difference, my older 486 boards were okay booting from the Gotek, but since I started using a couple of Socket 7 & Socket 370 boards more, those refuse to boot from floppy.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I have tried my Gotek on several machines and with several images, but I can't get it to boot the DOS 6.22 installation disk. […]
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I have tried my Gotek on several machines and with several images, but I can't get it to boot the DOS 6.22 installation disk.

I am using the official formatting software. I have tried making each image bootable, and I have also tried simply writing the disk image. I get the retry, abort, or failure after a failed disk check each time. I have also tried a couple different DOS images with no success.

In each machine, once booted into an OS, I can read and write to the floppy images as expected, I simply can't boot to them.

I suspect that this may be a common problem, but I haven't been able to find anything in my searches.

I have found this recent support thread, in regards to custom HxC firmware.

https://torlus.com/floppy/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3544

As a last resort I can try that, but I don't want to break out the soldering iron if I don't have to, or pay for the firmware. Any ideas?

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

kalm_traveler wrote:

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

I'm sorry for the miscommunication. This is the software I have been using.

mothergoose729 wrote:

kalm_traveler wrote:

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

I'm sorry for the miscommunication. This is the software I have been using.

Where did you get your boot images? I've used Windows 98SE, Windows Me, and Windows 2000 boot images from winworldpc and they all work great. Haven't tried any MS-DOS images yet.

It works! I feel kind of dumb now 😒

The problem seems to be that the gotek emulator takes its good sweet time to get going. When I first boot up the computer with the DOS disk image 1 set to 00 it will fail to boot the disk and prompt me to retry. However, if I then retry on the same image, or press reset and let it boot from 00 as normal, it seems to work fine. I think it takes a full minute or so after powering on before it is ready to be read by the host computer.

I feel like I would have discovered this earlier, so I am not sure what was different about this time... but anyway it is working now. Currently waiting for a 4.77mhz 8088 to format 2GB partition 🤣

So lesson learned... be patient!