@esm is the floppy drive even detected correctly and/or works
@Ezio if I take out the floppy drive it lists None under Diskette A, so i'd imagine that it's detecting the drive
@esm wtf then, are you sure the dos disk is bootable?
@Ezio I used dd to write the floppy disk, idk if that works in this case though
@esm that should work? if you have another PC that runs DOS/win9x, try making a boot floppy there with the SYS command (or format /s if not winme)
@Ezio unfortunately this is the only system I have that runs dos/win9x, it's also the only system I have with an "actual" floppy drive (i've been using a USB floppy drive to write them)
@esm the usb floppy shouldnt be the problem; i use one occasionally to write disks and they boot fine. Mind you, i dont use dd, i use http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite on windows, so idk if dd is actually the problem here
@Ezio just tried writing the disk using that tool (I passed through the drive to my VM), same result unfortunately
something definitely seems to be up with the laptop, idk what it could be though
@esm i wonder if the drive cant read 1.44mb disks. thatd be a bit strange but not impossible
@Ezio i read up on it and can confirm that yes, it supports 1.44 MB drives
@esm drive might be bad then, idk
i've tried booting this thing from a linux disk, an ms-dos 6.22 bootdisk, a windows 98 bootdisk, and a disk containing BIOS update files
don't know what to do