Not booting

[cyd15]

Hi, i have old socket 7 motherboard, when trying from boot from floppy its not working with windows 98 boot disk? its working a little bit then stopping from boot?

[Wunderbar98]

Hi @cyd15.

How old is your bootdisk :)

Can you test read/write or ScanDisk the floppy on another system? Some Windows 98 releases have a bootable CD, no need for a floppy. You don't provide much information so anyone trying to help needs to play 20 questions.

[cyd15]

yes thanks, im tested another system it stops booting, after running a few beeps.. i remember im boot many times with same hardware but maybe it is about caching or other thing

[Wunderbar98]

If at least one system had a known working floppy drive then the floppy disk is problematic, but with older hardware it could be both floppy drives tested are faulty. These old drives are quite mechanical and get dusty and gummed up with dry grease. If you are so inclined, dismantling and refurbishing the drives to restore function is very rewarding.

From your report it does, however, sound like the floppy disk is no good. Did you confirm the BIOS is set to boot from floppy? If the CMOS battery is dead the system won't remember your settings. Boot into BIOS, update system clock and boot options, save BIOS settings, power off computer, reboot in a few minutes and confirm it remembered the updated clock and boot settings.

Do you have another floppy to confirm the drive works?

If the system has no working operating system then boot a GNU/Linux LiveCD, insert the floppy after booting GNU/Linux and see if it can be mounted and read. Query most modern GNU/Linux releases may not be setup to default read a floppy drive, you may want to trial an old Damn Small Linux release or similar.

Recommend inserting your Windows 98 installation CD, changing the BIOS to boot from CD and see if it works. My Windows 98 SE release, purchased new back in the day, came with a boot floppy too, even though the CD was also bootable. I haven't installed a working floppy drive into any system for 15+ years. You won't know until you try.

There are methods to install Windows 98 without a working floppy or bootable Windows 98 CD, still options and hope.