LED constantly on is an indication of the cable being flipped. It's important to connect the cable correctly with the floppy drive at the end, where there is a twist and the other end connected to the motherboard. There is usually a line with a different colour on one side of the cable, this needs to be pin 1 on both the motherboard and floppy sides.

Freedos doesnt have HIMEM.SYS, so the WIN95 error makes sense.
If you remove the barrel battery you should replace it with an external battery.

What motherboard does your computer have? If you don't know can you provide a picture?

Dorunkāku wrote on 2026-10-28, 21:32:

Freedos doesnt have HIMEM.SYS, so the WIN95 error makes sense.
If you remove the barrel battery you should replace it with an external battery.

What motherboard does your computer have? If you don't know can you provide a picture?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA5486 AL. Currently I am not able to replace the battery, I just need to get at least DOS 6.22 on this hard drive without having to use the floppy drive, because for some reason it just won't work.

EduBat wrote on 2026-10-28, 21:06:

LED constantly on is an indication of the cable being flipped. It's important to connect the cable correctly with the floppy drive at the end, where there is a twist and the other end connected to the motherboard. There is usually a line with a different colour on one side of the cable, this needs to be pin 1 on both the motherboard and floppy sides.

That's what confuses me though: I never touched the ribbon cables for the floppy drive before all of this. Someone mentioned this to me before so I checked and my floppy drive appears to be connected properly.

Sometimes floppy disks stop working. I try at least three other disks when there's a problem... they're old analog media.

Also may need to re-enter BIOS settings for the disk drive if the settings aren't saved.

First some notes regarding installing W95:

Note that for some elements, it can be important that the startup diskette is the correct one for the Windows CD you're trying to install, because of version differences in files on the CD versus diskette. I've had mixed results using mixed pairings of CD and diskette.

The boot diskette also provides the CD-ROM driver for your W95 install.

When installing W95, I start with deleting all partitions, partitioning and formatting the harddrive using fdisk on the boot diskette. It is important that you do this the right way, including when to reboot to activate the newly made partition(s).

So the big thing that needs to happen first is that you need to get your floppy drive working on the 486.

Erasing the hard drive won't have anything to do with the floppy drive not working now. I'm rather thinking along the lines of it not being configured correctly by the default BIOS settings since removing the CMOS battery. So dive into your BIOS and check that there is a 1.44mb A: configured and that the boot order is A, C. Check that the ribbon cable is well seated on the motherboard and in the diskette drive. Check that the power cable is well seated in the diskette drive. Check that the ribbon cable is the right type, with the twist near the diskette drive, and that the drive is indeed plugged into the end of the cable beyond the twist, not in the (optional) second connector before the twist. Check the orientation of both ends of the ribbon cable and of the power cable. LED remaining lit is typical for wrong ribbon cable orientation or wrong BIOS settings. It could be a broken floppy controller on the motherboard, but given the recent history my money's on BIOS settings and possibly ribbon cable.

Try cleaning the floppy drive heads - ImageDisk has a pretty good head cleaning fumction.

If you have DOS working (even FreeDos) and a serial port you should be able to "bootstrap" DDLINK to it for file transfer.

Make sure floppy drive is jumpeted as 2(assuming 1,2,3,4)

If you have CD drive, does BIOS support boot from CD?

(Added "2" apparently missed at posting)

I love 486 computers...
Can you post a picture just out of curiosity.

Also, I personally would start fresh and install DOS 6.22.
The floppy drive light being on constantly should mean that the cable is not connected properly. open it up and make sure the cable has the red stripe lined up with pin 1. check the motherboard end and the drive end.
Is the drive directly to the motherboard or is it on a controller card? Good reason to open this up and take some pics to post so we can see what were working with

Close to the barrel battery is an external battery connector. The first thing I would do is to connect an external one.

Second is the bios. Does it keep the settings, can you configure FDD and HDD?

What are the messages on screen during the boot sequence?

Cable can also be flipped on the motherboard side?

Post some pictures

I can't get very good pictures unless I unplug everything from the motherboard, and I am very nervous about doing that because I don't want to break anything. These are the best pictures I could get. Also I don't think it would be connected improperly to the motherboard because I never touched those connections and it worked fine before. Either way I can confirm that the connectors are all plugged in properly, to the motherboard and to the floppy drive.

Pics: https://imgur.com/a/BZh6QS6

And the CMOS battery likely was dead before I got the computer, I was just advised to remove it asap so it didn't leak. I'm not confident in my ability to solder, so I won't be able to have a CMOS battery for a little while until I find someone who can do it for me. But since I don't think it was working anyway, I doubt it would have to do with that or the bios because the bios settings never changed.

The only thing I did to this before the floppy drive started acting up was I formatted C in freeDOS because I thought I could just use the boot floppy I made on my win98 pc to boot the 486 and install win95. As soon as I did that, the floppy LED was constantly lit and it wouldn't let me use any disks. It doesn't make sense to me that formatting would have done anything to the drive itself, so that's why I'm confused. When I got the pc I installed a game from 5 floppy disks and it worked fine and the LED was not constantly on, but after formatting it started acting weird.

As for my other issues, I did manage to get DOS 6.22 installed using an ide to usb adapter and qemu and was also able to install Win95c so my CD drive is working again. Now I have a new problem though. I bought a brand new microsoft serial mouse and it was working fine during the windows95 setup screen, but once win95 was installed my mouse would not work. Sometimes during the first few seconds after booting and getting to the desktop my mouse will work, and then it will freeze. In device manager "standard serial mouse" appears to be working correctly. I did something earlier today that fixed it but I can't remember what it was, and then I tried to figure out why Doom2 wasn't playing any music and as soon as I changed one of the resource settings for my soundcard the mouse froze again. It was either the i/o or the irq setting that I changed.

That is a resource conflict between your sound card and your serial mouse. Both are using the same IRQ. So you need to change one of them. This too can sometimes be resolved in BIOS. Note that your sound card resource setup can be different for DOS versus Windows. The way I did it: in my BIOS, I could reserve an IRQ for the serial mouse. In DOS, I could use the default proposed SoundBlaster resources. And in Windows, I manually chose (in device manager) resources that did not conflict with the mouse.

Anyway, good that you have Windows and CDROM via a roundabout way now. How's the floppy drive doing after this? Do you see a drive A: in Windows at all? LED still constantly on?

I'm thinking, since likely you have an I/O card to which the floppy ribbon is plugged, you might have a resource conflict there as well causing the floppy drive to not work. My money still is on BIOS settings causing the issue(s).