@Ezio if I take out the floppy drive it lists None under Diskette A, so i'd imagine that it's detecting the drive
@Ezio I used dd to write the floppy disk, idk if that works in this case though
@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)
@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
@Ezio i read up on it and can confirm that yes, it supports 1.44 MB drives
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