ms-dos 4.01 disks won't read

[Rodney01]

my ms-dos 4.01 install disk and ms-dos shell disk dosn't read it display's general falure reading drive a retry,fail,abort these floppy's are 5.25 inch i need to know if it can be fixed

[PC Solutions]

Doubtful. Those are very old disks, especially in 5 1/4 media. That is where the floppy disk got its name after all.

I still have several hundred disks sitting around and a system running DOS 5.0 that can actually read them still. It is fun to look back at old programs sometimes.

Shelf life on floppy disks is ony a couple of years. Thats the 1.44 media too.
These are over 10 years old.

One thing you can try though is to go to your local Walmart (or wherever) and get a can of compressed air. Blow out the drive. That might work. Dust in a 5 1/4 drive will cause it not to read the disks correctly.

Curiosity question. Why are you wanting to read DOS 4.01 disks anyway?

[Rodney01]

well someone gave me the complete set and iv'e been meaning to try them out plus i like old operating systems

[PC Solutions]

Dos 4.01 is a vintage OS.
No cdrom or sound card support. That was DOS 5+
Entirely command line based. And you had to know the syntax or use a menuing program. I used Point and Shoot.
Did everything we needed though. WordStar and Lotus 123.
Never crashed. Not a single Blue Screen of Death!

I like the old OSes too.
Newer does not mean better!

[Rodney01]

originally i had a computer that we brought ages ago it was a windows 386 and it crashed that's why it was given to me but i found that the hard drive was brocken so i took the 5.25 inch drive out of it and put in my 486

[Rodney01]

i have not tried compressed air yet but it reads all disks exept for the install disk and ms-dos shell disks

[PC Solutions]

Unfortunately your disks might have gone to software heaven!
All disk drives and disks will fail. That is only a matter of time.

MSDOS 4.01 came originally on 6 5.25 media.
Windows version 1.0A came on two 5.25 disks. I actually have it.
I dont remember if it was 720K or 1.2k media.

I am curios if you actually got DOS 4.01 to boot on this sytem at this point.

[Rodney01]

yes the operating 3 disk boot's it up but i still can't install it though

[Eeyore]

yes the operating 3 disk boot's it up but i still can't install it though

Having not dealt with that operating system, I would expect that the files on those disks are not compressed, as DOS 5 and 6 are. If the disk boots the computer, you should be able to copy the files to a hard drive. If the "SYS" command functions, that should allow making the computer bootable from the system. "Installation" is more of a convinience.

I have copied DOS 2.2 and DOS 5 and 6 from 5" disk to 3.5" disks, and even modified the INI file so that the install program would install from 2ea 3.5" disk rather thant the original 4ea 5" disks.

I would certainly copy all the files to newer media before they become totally unreadable. In disk duplication I have copied the image of a 5" disk to a 1.44 3.5" disk. The new 3.5" disk reported as a 1.2mb disk.

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[Robert M]

Hogwash, Data on floppy disks can last for years and years and years.
Floppy diskettes can also last for years and years and years.
Data on even the oldest floppy diskettes should still be readable.
I think that message can appear when the CMOS settings for the floppy drive are incorrect.

[lgbpop]

Hogwash, Data on floppy disks can last for years and years and years.
Floppy diskettes can also last for years and years and years.
Data on even the oldest floppy diskettes should still be readable.
I think that message can appear when the CMOS settings for the floppy drive are incorrect.

Under ideal conditions, yes. One rarely encounters ideal conditions, so please don't deride someone else's experience.

[Nix]

Under ideal conditions, yes. One rarely encounters ideal conditions, so please don't deride someone else's experience.

Well I guess it's consistent with his argument that hard drives never fail. http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=199990 sot it makes sense that floppys wouldn't either - even less in them to go wrong

[Train]

I sure wish I had cash for all the floppies I have had go bad.
Buy myself a new computer!

[Abhoth]

Yeah, I kept dropping those and the bits and bytes just went all whilly nilly!

[Robert M]

Train, I agree
If you threw away diskettes every time you saw this message or some of the other messages that may be seen working with floppies, and incorrectly assumed they were bad, you probably could buy another computer with the cash wasted on floppies.

About the only things floppies cannot stand up to are magnetic fields and extreme heat, for example leaving them in a hot car in the summer with the windows up.


Floppy disk drives nor floppy diskettes should be assumed bad when encountering this message without further investigation of CMOS settings, the capacity of the floppy diskette and whether it matches the capacity of the floppy drive being used, whether or not the floppy has been formatted correctly,the operating system being used, and whether or not the drive door is closed.

I wish I had a nickel for everyone who ever bought replacement computer equipment like floppy disks and drives, hard disks, video cards, and modems that they didn't really need or bought as a result of seeing a message on the screen.