I finally fixed a Windows 98 machine with a boot floppy

My old Gateway from 1999 wouldn't boot past the logo screen. After digging through a box of floppies, I found one with a clean DOS boot disk and got it running again to back up some files. Anybody else keep a stash of old boot disks just in case?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_price12d agoMost Upvoted

Man, I totally get that! But here's my question: did you actually make SURE that boot floppy was clean, or did you just cross your fingers and hope for the best? Because I've been bit by that before - grabbed a floppy I thought was a clean DOS disk and it ended up having some weird boot sector virus from 1995 on it. That old Gateway BIOS is probably vulnerable to stuff that won't even run on modern hardware, but it can still mess up your boot process. Those old machines are so finicky about the exact version of MS-DOS on the floppy too. I'd honestly recommend imaging that floppy and keeping a copy on a USB drive connected through a PCI card, just in case your only copy gets corrupted.

ryan_stone12d ago

Had a buddy lose his whole vintage DOS setup because of a bad floppy. He found a "clean" boot disk at a flea market, turned out it had some boot sector thing from the 90s. Wiped his hard drive cleaner than a whistle, and he never got that old Gateway to boot right again.