Well, I moved it to another ISA slot and disconnected the HD and now it will try to boot from the floppy. It brought up the win98 "boot from CDrom" menu when I tried the Win98 startup disk. I want to install DOS 6.22, so I am trying to get it to boot from the DOS install disks. It's now hanging on "Starting MS DOS".

Got it to work, finally. Man, these floppy disks I have have been going bad faster than I can write to them! Was a freshly sealed pack, probably around 18 years old, but had never been used before. Went bad almost immediately after writing the DOS boot disk to it.

Hard drive is formatting now. Sheesh.

tizzdizz wrote:

Man, these floppy disks I have have been going bad faster than I can write to them! Was a freshly sealed pack, probably around 18 years old, but had never been used before. Went bad almost immediately after writing the DOS boot disk to it.

From my personal experience, floppy disks from the late 90s and 2000s were not as reliable as older ones.
I remember, at some point they even got plastic sliders. Perhaps because that technology was beeing phased-out
or something (lower quality because of cost reduction, etc).

Same for floppy drives. Slick USB floppy drives tend to have read/write issues more
often than the older, bulky models (those from the G3 iMac era).

Anyway, that's just my personal experience so far and I guess not all of the newer floppies are affected.
I've got some coloured floppy disks made by EMTEC, for example, which do retain their data quite well.

Trying to find a fully working 3.5" floppy drive is getting harder and harder. Probably going to switch to the floppy emulators pretty soon.

I have a huge number of blank AOL 3.5" disks that were never used.. got sold off when AOL stopped using floppies.

Out of 3 or 4 drives I have tried , only 1 of them will work reliably with disks. I also have a 2x speed USB floppy drive that works with them 100% of the time.

So those disks may not be faulty, it may be that the drives are on their way out. I was experiencing the same sort of thing when I was first trying to use new old stock disks. They seemed like they were bad, but it ended up being the drives.

That's good info. I have 7 drives, and can't seem to find a rhyme or reason to which ones will work. It seems intermittent. At least I've found 3 that work with the 3 systems I have going so far.

Also, I was finally successful in setting up this computer with a HDD, floppy and CD rom (piggybacked on HD cable because I can't figure out how to enable the IDE controller on the Soundblaster card.

Doom even works, full screen with high detail and everything!