VOGONS


First post, by dickkickem

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I've gotten all my floppy games to work on my XP machine except System Shock, and I was getting a disk read error with disk #2 of my Ultimate DOOM on my Windows 95 laptop. However, I wasn't getting that error on my Windows XP machine, and I got it to play and install fine.

I was able to install SEAL Team and Shadow President (I only have 4 floppy based DOS games, SS1, SEAL Team, Ultimate Doom, and Shadow President) on my Windows 95 laptop through floppies, but I can't install Ultimate DOOM on it for some reason. I am running the computer in DOS mode, too.

Anyone might know the problem? I'm not 100% sure if there's something wrong with my floppy drive now...

DOS game collection
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My vintage rigs:
Fujitsu Lifebook E330 - Working w/ Win95
Fujitsu Lifebook C352 - Nonworking 🙁
HP Pavilion A520N - Working w/ WinXP
AST Ascentia M 5260X - Working w/ WinME
IBM ThinkPad 770 - Working w/ Win2K

Reply 2 of 11, by dickkickem

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derSammler wrote:

Not enough answers in the same thread you opened 12 days ago?

Various errors with some floppy disk-based games, I need some help here!

I did a little more experimenting. I thought my floppy drive was the problem until I got a couple games to actually install. It's just that I'm having problems with DOOM. My hard drive checked out fine, too, and all the SMART attributes seem normal.
https://i.imgur.com/LClFbyc.jpg

DOS game collection
YouTube
Instagram

My vintage rigs:
Fujitsu Lifebook E330 - Working w/ Win95
Fujitsu Lifebook C352 - Nonworking 🙁
HP Pavilion A520N - Working w/ WinXP
AST Ascentia M 5260X - Working w/ WinME
IBM ThinkPad 770 - Working w/ Win2K

Reply 4 of 11, by tpowell.ca

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FFXIhealer wrote:

Soooo, copy the contents of that one disk to another floppy disk and try installing it again?

+1 for this solution.

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Reply 5 of 11, by dickkickem

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FFXIhealer wrote:

Soooo, copy the contents of that one disk to another floppy disk and try installing it again?

That's very strange, it actually worked. Do you know why this is?

DOS game collection
YouTube
Instagram

My vintage rigs:
Fujitsu Lifebook E330 - Working w/ Win95
Fujitsu Lifebook C352 - Nonworking 🙁
HP Pavilion A520N - Working w/ WinXP
AST Ascentia M 5260X - Working w/ WinME
IBM ThinkPad 770 - Working w/ Win2K

Reply 6 of 11, by canthearu

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dickkickem wrote:

Anyone might know the problem? I'm not 100% sure if there's something wrong with my floppy drive now...

Use diskcopy to make a clone of the iffy doom disk on the computer it works in, then install it on Win95 laptop.

If most other disks work fine on the Win95 laptop, then the drive is likely fine. Probably just a disk (the doom disk) that is on it's way out. You should probably keep .img backups of all the games/applications you have on floppy disk that you want to save.

Reply 8 of 11, by EdmondDantes

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Question: Why do you need to install from the floppies at all? Doom is one of those games where once you have an installation, you can just copy the full install directory to another drive and the game will run just fine... this is twice as true if this is the Win95 port (on my Doom Collection CD I don't even use the installer, I just copypaste since the default installer creates redundant directories when you can just put all the WADs in one place).

So since you have one install that went fine... copy that install to your Win95 machine?

Reply 9 of 11, by FFXIhealer

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dickkickem wrote:
FFXIhealer wrote:

Soooo, copy the contents of that one disk to another floppy disk and try installing it again?

That's very strange, it actually worked. Do you know why this is?

It would also have worked if you had copied all of the files from the disk to your hard drive, then reformatted the floppy and wrote them all back to the original disk again.

The reason that works is because of the way the data is stored. It is a floppy plastic disk with a magnetic coating applied to the surface of both sides. The magnet polarizes specific spots to encode a 1 or a 0 onto the surface magnetically. Over time, that magnetization can degrade, making them not read properly on some drives.

By reformatting, you've set up the entire disk to be written to again. By writing the files back to the disk, you let the disk drive encode fresh magnetic spots, not worn down ones.

Also, sometimes disks themselves degrade so they CAN'T hold a proper magnetic charge anymore. A fresh disk solves this issue. Hence, why my solution worked. And it's an outside the box solution, like a lot of my solutions tend to be.

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Reply 10 of 11, by chinny22

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EdmondDantes wrote:

Question: Why do you need to install from the floppies at all? Doom is one of those games where once you have an installation, you can just copy the full install directory to another drive and the game will run just fine... this is twice as true if this is the Win95 port (on my Doom Collection CD I don't even use the installer, I just copypaste since the default installer creates redundant directories when you can just put all the WADs in one place).

So since you have one install that went fine... copy that install to your Win95 machine?

This,
Unless you want the full nostalgia of installing the game (and sometimes I do!) Its actually easier/faster these days to zip up the installed game and extract it on any PC you want it.
Only exception to this is some CD-Rom based games where the CD drive is a different drive letter, and even then you can get round this

Reply 11 of 11, by dickkickem

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chinny22 wrote:
This, Unless you want the full nostalgia of installing the game (and sometimes I do!) Its actually easier/faster these days to […]
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EdmondDantes wrote:

Question: Why do you need to install from the floppies at all? Doom is one of those games where once you have an installation, you can just copy the full install directory to another drive and the game will run just fine... this is twice as true if this is the Win95 port (on my Doom Collection CD I don't even use the installer, I just copypaste since the default installer creates redundant directories when you can just put all the WADs in one place).

So since you have one install that went fine... copy that install to your Win95 machine?

This,
Unless you want the full nostalgia of installing the game (and sometimes I do!) Its actually easier/faster these days to zip up the installed game and extract it on any PC you want it.
Only exception to this is some CD-Rom based games where the CD drive is a different drive letter, and even then you can get round this

That's primarily why I like my games on floppies!

DOS game collection
YouTube
Instagram

My vintage rigs:
Fujitsu Lifebook E330 - Working w/ Win95
Fujitsu Lifebook C352 - Nonworking 🙁
HP Pavilion A520N - Working w/ WinXP
AST Ascentia M 5260X - Working w/ WinME
IBM ThinkPad 770 - Working w/ Win2K