The same thing happens on two of mine, with both FlashFloppy and the regular Gotek firmware (though I haven't tested both combinations). The drive reads in Windows but just won't boot from it, even though the drive shows its doing a floppy seek on boot. I honestly think I've damaged them at this point.

Thanks for the thread link, maybe the HxC firmware is worth the cost? I'll have to have a read through the thread to try to understand what's going on. I think it's also certain motherboard combinations make a difference, my older 486 boards were okay booting from the Gotek, but since I started using a couple of Socket 7 & Socket 370 boards more, those refuse to boot from floppy.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I have tried my Gotek on several machines and with several images, but I can't get it to boot the DOS 6.22 installation disk. […]
Show full quote

I have tried my Gotek on several machines and with several images, but I can't get it to boot the DOS 6.22 installation disk.

I am using the official formatting software. I have tried making each image bootable, and I have also tried simply writing the disk image. I get the retry, abort, or failure after a failed disk check each time. I have also tried a couple different DOS images with no success.

In each machine, once booted into an OS, I can read and write to the floppy images as expected, I simply can't boot to them.

I suspect that this may be a common problem, but I haven't been able to find anything in my searches.

I have found this recent support thread, in regards to custom HxC firmware.

https://torlus.com/floppy/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3544

As a last resort I can try that, but I don't want to break out the soldering iron if I don't have to, or pay for the firmware. Any ideas?

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

kalm_traveler wrote:

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

I'm sorry for the miscommunication. This is the software I have been using.

mothergoose729 wrote:

kalm_traveler wrote:

I wouldn't use the official software... far as I've read, there's a German company which makes software for it that is much better - that's all I've used and it has worked perfectly for several boot disk images so far.

This 'floppy emulator v2' software here is what I use and it works perfectly: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gotek-floppy-emulator.html

I'm sorry for the miscommunication. This is the software I have been using.

Where did you get your boot images? I've used Windows 98SE, Windows Me, and Windows 2000 boot images from REMOVED and they all work great. Haven't tried any MS-DOS images yet.

It works! I feel kind of dumb now 😒

The problem seems to be that the gotek emulator takes its good sweet time to get going. When I first boot up the computer with the DOS disk image 1 set to 00 it will fail to boot the disk and prompt me to retry. However, if I then retry on the same image, or press reset and let it boot from 00 as normal, it seems to work fine. I think it takes a full minute or so after powering on before it is ready to be read by the host computer.

I feel like I would have discovered this earlier, so I am not sure what was different about this time... but anyway it is working now. Currently waiting for a 4.77mhz 8088 to format 2GB partition 🤣

So lesson learned... be patient!

I had a similar problem: I was unable to boot from Gotek images, although the Gotek drive seemed to work fine in Windows. In my case, the problem turned out to be a specific BIOS setting: "PCI Delay Transaction." The Gotek boots fine as long as this setting is disabled; if enabled, I get bad sector errors, e.g. when attempting to boot MenuetOS. This is on a Rioworks PDVIA motherboard, with a VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset.

I still have this problem. I downloaded images from winworld, internet archive and one other site I can't remember, and I can't boot any of them.
A win98 boot image with the gotek emulator works fine on this pc. However ms dos 6.22 won't boot. It prompts to retry as it is not a boot disk.
With the gotek software I can make a bootable ms dos 6.22 disk, and that works fine as well. Furthermore if I boot from that and then change the emulator slot to the dos setup #1 disk, setup.exe can be started. However setup can't be finished as it looks for setup disk #1, and can't find it (although I started setup.exe just from that).
Waiting a full minute or more doesn't help either.
I don't think thats a gotek problem, because I can read the disks, and win98 boot img works.
Can anyone help me with this? What else should I try?

I am having a similar issue. I have the U100 model without the fancy LCD and rotary encoder. Every bootable image a throw at it that is not a DOS boot disk, like MS-DOS 6.22, will boot no problem. Like the bootable ASTRA disk works fine. If you select the DOS boot disk, it just says non system disk and to replace with a system disk.

I got (and love) a GoTek floppy emulator a month or two ago...
It has a small 3-digit LCD display and two push buttons (no rotary control)
It's model number is: SFR1M44-U100

I mostly use it like a real floppy. I don't use any special "GoTek" specific tools or software.
I am still running with the original GoTek firmware (I've not seen reason to replace it)

I usually use it under DOS, and format/read/write it like any other floppy.

My main tool for reading/writing whole images is my own "XDISK.COM", this reads or writes a floppy to/from a pure binary image file (ie: a 1.44m 3.5 diskette is a 1,474,560 byte image file, 360k 5.25 is 368,640, 320k 5.25 is 327,640 etc.)

I also use my own "FDI.COM" to create blank images, as well as inject or retrieve individual files to/from an image.

To write an image from Winblows I use a little third party tool I found called "DSKWRITE.EXE" - this uses the same pure binary images that XDISK does!

I've made and booted lots of different DOS boot disk on it, including:

1 Microsoft MSDOS 2.11, 3.31, 4.00, 5.00, 6.00 and WinME edition of DOS
2 IBM PCDOS 2.10, 3.00, 3.30, 7.1
3 FreeDOS 0.84 (not tried newer but I'm sure they would work)
4 Caldera OpenDOS
5 PTSDOS

Everything has worked well, and I've had no unusual problems.

I've not tried the very early editions of MS 1.12 and PC 0.90,1.00,1.10 images that I have available - they're not terribly useful, and they are in an odd SS/160k (163,840) format - I'd have to convert them to ImageDisk .IMDs to write them, and not knowing if GoTek actually supports these old formats (likely not) - it would probably take a significant amount of screwing around... but I might be able to do some tests if anyone is interested/cares]

Btw, interesting side-note - If I stuff a stick with multiple GoTek floppy images on it into one of my Win7 boxes (haven't tried 10,11 yes) - it sees and can access the first image! (Remaining images are inaccessible/not visible)

Btw, if you want to try the boot images I've made, grab DBDOS (DosBox Boot DOS) from the downloads area of my site.

Although this is primarily made as a way to run various flavors of "real DOS" under DosBox, it does include the boot image files,
and the tools to read/write images from/to actual diskettes (incl the GoTek)

I may have mispoken... (sorry, been playing with several floppy disk systems)

I think the U100 might only support 500k data rate ... which would only cover 1.44m 3.5 and 1.2m 5.25

I have definitely booted 1.4m 3.5 images a LOT on the GoTek - mostly DOS 5, but I have tried 6.--