Do you have a functional floppy drive, and a blank diskette?

You can try chain booting it with PlopBoot, if you do. This can be used to USB Boot machines that dont have bios support as well.

https://youtu.be/jQN25DeTGAw?si=7klNCPf0rPlDm4aJ

(I am at work and our firewall blocks plopboot's website or I would link there too.)

wierd_w wrote on 2025-05-20, 21:55:

Do you have a functional floppy drive, and a blank diskette?

You can try chain booting it with PlopBoot, if you do. This can be used to USB Boot machines that dont have bios support as well.

I have one, but not only is it dead, it also corrupts all floppies I put in it. I also have a "modern" Chinese USB floppy drive, but somehow doubt this will be successful.

a plopboot CDrom is a useful tool in your geek kit, if a plopboot floppy is not an option.

You MIGHT be able to make a plopboot USB (as dumb as this sounds), since you say linux live disks are seen, then use THAT to chainload a DIFFERENT USB stick.

The Chinesium USB floppy drive might also just work. You never know till you try.

USB storage does get recognized on this thing, depending on the filesystem -- that's why I thought that booting was still possible. The boot options definitely include USB stuff, I just don't know how to format it. I own a whole stack of CDs with numerous OS installs as part of my "kit," but all of it is at my friend's house in another state, because I moved and didn't take all of my crap with me. 😒

If there are no other options, since I literally have only one definitively working USB stick (I know), it's literally purchasing a new USB vs a stack of CDs, I guess. Same $5-10 price, too! 😀

If you have working diskettes, i'd give that chinesium USB floppy a try first.

If not, blank CDr purchase is on the menu.

wierd_w wrote on 2025-05-20, 22:02:

The Chinesium USB floppy drive might also just work. You never know till you try.

Hmmm..... Depending on the USB port, it refuses to post or sees a "USB Storage device TEACv.0". That is something at least.

wierd_w wrote on 2025-05-20, 22:15:

If you have working diskettes, i'd give that chinesium USB floppy a try first.

If not, blank CDr purchase is on the menu.

It looks like chinesium thingie may have saved the day. Thank you for that. 😉 So then let rufus flash things on an NTFS-formatted USB?

Yup. There is a hidden option in plopboot to force using USB1.1 mode by holding SHIFT+U when selecting it.

i had a problem recently with trying to get rufus to boot on older 478/775 boards, i was using rufus 3.20 which wasnt working so i switched to rufus 3.13 and it booted no problem, you will need to check the box "Add Fixes For Older BIOS" if you havent already, and you may also need to check the other box for "Use Rufus MBR With BIOS ID" and leave the drop down menu set at default.

The plop causes a reboot followed by failure to post when the USB floppy drive is connected simultaneously with the USB stick. Unless I am supposed to disconnect the floppy at some point, looks like I'm out of luck.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-20, 23:28:

i had a problem recently with trying to get rufus to boot on older 478/775 boards, i was using rufus 3.20 which wasnt working so i switched to rufus 3.13 and it booted no problem, you will need to check the box "Add Fixes For Older BIOS" if you havent already, and you may also need to check the other box for "Use Rufus MBR With BIOS ID" and leave the drop down menu set at default.

Hmm. My rufus version is 3.21, so let's try 3.13. I did check the 'add fixes' box in the past and it did nothing.

Nope, no luck with the older rufus version.

multiplebaboons wrote on 2025-05-20, 23:53:

The plop causes a reboot followed by failure to post when the USB floppy drive is connected simultaneously with the USB stick. Unless I am supposed to disconnect the floppy at some point, looks like I'm out of luck.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-20, 23:28:

i had a problem recently with trying to get rufus to boot on older 478/775 boards, i was using rufus 3.20 which wasnt working so i switched to rufus 3.13 and it booted no problem, you will need to check the box "Add Fixes For Older BIOS" if you havent already, and you may also need to check the other box for "Use Rufus MBR With BIOS ID" and leave the drop down menu set at default.

Hmm. My rufus version is 3.21, so let's try 3.13. I did check the 'add fixes' box in the past and it did nothing.

you need the add fixes box selected for hardware this old, it should always be checked, if it doesnt work with that then it may need the MBR box below checked as well , having both checked should do it, if not it could be down to an option in your bios, make sure legacy usb is enabled if theres an option for it.

im pretty sure it was rufus 3.13 i used the only other one i have is 3.10, i managed to get it to boot on a socket 478/775 and a via c3 board, sometimes it did take a bit to load rufus so give it 5 mins at least.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-21, 00:28:

you need the add fixes box selected for hardware this old, it should always be checked, if it doesnt work with that then it may need the MBR box below checked as well , having both checked should do it, if not it could be down to an option in your bios, make sure legacy usb is enabled if theres an option for it.

im pretty sure it was rufus 3.13 i used the only other one i have is 3.10, i managed to get it to boot on a socket 478/775 and a via c3 board, sometimes it did take a bit to load rufus so give it 5 mins at least.

This is what I have. If you think this is reasonable, I will try to flash again. Interestingly, in the drop-down menu on the right of "Use Rufus MBR with BIOS ID" the value it wants to use by default is 0x81 (Disk 2) and not 0x80. Does this matter?

multiplebaboons wrote on 2025-05-21, 01:46:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-21, 00:28:

you need the add fixes box selected for hardware this old, it should always be checked, if it doesnt work with that then it may need the MBR box below checked as well , having both checked should do it, if not it could be down to an option in your bios, make sure legacy usb is enabled if theres an option for it.

im pretty sure it was rufus 3.13 i used the only other one i have is 3.10, i managed to get it to boot on a socket 478/775 and a via c3 board, sometimes it did take a bit to load rufus so give it 5 mins at least.

This is what I have. If you think this is reasonable, I will try to flash again. Interestingly, in the drop-down menu on the right of "Use Rufus MBR with BIOS ID" the value it wants to use by default is 0x81 (Disk 2) and not 0x80. Does this matter?

yeah that looks fine, with the drop down box, of the times ive had it checked ive alway had it set to default 0x80, which is according to other how-to's ive read from others. i use those setting on older systems for freedos, win10/win11 and linux, so should be good for XP.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-21, 03:39:

yeah that looks fine, with the drop down box, of the times ive had it checked ive alway had it set to default 0x80, which is according to other how-to's ive read from others. i use those setting on older systems for freedos, win10/win11 and linux, so should be good for XP.

Alright, let me try then. This PC does something extremely weird. Out of nowhere (without me touching anything), empty cdrom shows activity -- sometimes a bunch of times in a row. Any ideas what might be happening here? Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/agmtt6oz3evzgz … 70b6y6rgnl&dl=0

Turn it into an Easy2Boot drive and learn how to do it with that.

I think Philscomputerlab youtube channel did a quick n dirty how to on it.

Otherwise get a drive smaller than 64Gb.

multiplebaboons wrote on 2025-05-21, 03:59:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-05-21, 03:39:

yeah that looks fine, with the drop down box, of the times ive had it checked ive alway had it set to default 0x80, which is according to other how-to's ive read from others. i use those setting on older systems for freedos, win10/win11 and linux, so should be good for XP.

Alright, let me try then. This PC does something extremely weird. Out of nowhere (without me touching anything), empty cdrom shows activity -- sometimes a bunch of times in a row. Any ideas what might be happening here? Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/agmtt6oz3evzgz … 70b6y6rgnl&dl=0

if the cd drive is showing activity the pc is probably trying to boot from it instead of booting your usb, completely unplug your cd rom drive for the install, then plug the cd rom drive back in after windows is done installing.

i always remove any other drives the pc could potentially try to boot from for this reason, i just have the usb and the drive im installing to plugged in, then add the cd rom/extra hdds after install is complete.

I can't say I recall ever seeing attempts to boot while the PC is idle with BIOS open, I actually thought this could be unstable power. I disconnected the CDROM and will try rufus with a 16Gb SD card inside a USB adapter I just found, but at this point between all this nonsense and casual failures to post I think the motherboard might be fried.

The problems did not stop after replacing the CDROM and booting from a CD. The one stick of RAM it still had turned out to be faulty and it also refused to install XP on its old HDD, so I ended up putting in some random memory scraps (192Mb) + 64Gb SSD via a SATA-IDE adapter and now it runs XP. The shiny Soundblaster Live! card is also completely dead AND preventing detection of a neighboring PCI network adapter. I don't know how it is possible to have so many failed components... Where do you guys get your RAM other than ebay?