interesting that the memtest boots but windows CD doesnt..

I have an old LX motherboard and getting that to boot was a pain, but what finally got me over the line was what order it was plugged into the motherboard, it prioritized Primary master then slave, and Secondary master then slave. You could try putting the cd drive as primary master if you haevnt already, oh and disable seek floppy on startup if thats an option

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-10-06, 04:29:

I have ISO's on CD that are the "OEM Full" that should boot from disc and not floppy but they won't boot.

So, the CD has just one file on it, the .ISO? Or does the CD have the complete file structure? If it's just a single .ISO file, it's not going to boot.

The most obviouis test would be to put the win98 CD into a more modern PC. Does it boot there?

AlaricD wrote on 2025-10-06, 17:06:

If it's just a single .ISO file, it's not going to boot.

😀 Could be just that.

Yep, the Win98 disc will open on a newer machine and shows the file structure and not an ISO file.

I just swapped the primary and secondary masters so that the optical drive was primary and I still get the same result. All boot up floppy seeks are disabled.

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-10-06, 17:31:

Yep, the Win98 disc will open on a newer machine and shows the file structure and not an ISO file.

You'd be surprised how many times people have just burned the .ISO to the disk as that single file. 😀

As ux-3 suggested above, you should try booting from that disc on a newer machine (assuming it allows BIOS boot).

I popped the WinME disc into my Socket A machine and it works fine.

Now what?

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-10-06, 21:10:

I popped the WinME disc into my Socket A machine and it works fine.

Now what?

Incompatibility between burned CDs and various optical drives is something that happens. I still have an optical drive in my Windows 10 machine, but I've found that CDs burned on that machine often won't work with the old optical drives on my vintage machines. In such cases, burning one on one of my older machines generally works. And some older drives simply won't read burned CDs; I think the usual cause is selective burnout of certain light wave lengths in the laser. And there are also the issues of certain media and drives that refuse work properly together.

This is on my test bench, so the only thing that is changing is the MB/CPU combo. I also just tested the disc on my Slot A setup and it also works fine. It's something funny with this Aopen board.

I have a floppy emulator coming today probably, so I'll try that route.

I have experienced an issue where CD-ROM boot doesn't work when a SATA-IDE converter is added to the mix, but works when a native IDE DVD drive is used.

yeah this is a very weird one, looks like its may be something with the drive, I had a dvd drive and I had burned an copy of XP on a DVD (I didnt have any blank CD's at the time) and it just would not work, but putting a burning CD it into it did work about 90% of the way, in the the I plugged another drive in and did the install
IF you have another drive handy thats what I would try next

Open your win98 cd with isobuster, it will show if it's bootable or not.

lolo799 wrote on Yesterday, 13:53:

Open your win98 cd with isobuster, it will show if it's bootable or not.

We know it's bootable, another machine can boot from it.

AlaricD wrote on Yesterday, 13:55:

We know it's bootable, another machine can boot from it.

I wish he had worded it that way.

Sorry it wasn't clear the first time. Yes, the Win98/ME discs will boot from the IDE optical drive on both the Socket A and Slot A boards.

Looking through the AX6BC bioses, later ones did support booting Win2000 from disc in 1999. I'll check which version bios is on the board and perhaps update it before trying to use an OS bootdisk.

Voodoo Rufus wrote on Yesterday, 19:37:

Sorry it wasn't clear the first time. Yes, the Win98/ME discs will boot from the IDE optical drive on both the Socket A and Slot A boards.

Maybe it comes down to the BIOS itself, but you could also try swapping the IDE drives around, to see if the no-boot follows the drive, or if it follows the motherboard.