I am a 68-years old Neurosurgeon - a die-hard-fan and avid-user(for over three decades) of MS DOS 6.22 with QBasic1.0, Foxpro for DOS 2.5 a and Wordstar 4.0 for all my work - taking at the end of every day a zipped back up of all transaction files of the day into a single 1.44 MB FDD and back them upto my other PCs via FDD / USB Pen drive / Network etc., I use Windows only for surfing - telemedicine etc., Recently my 10 year old mobo started acting funny - weird messages about FDD, Keyboard not present etc., After sending the old mobo to service, I shifted the MS DOS ec., Hard disk to another mobo - removing a pre-existing XP Hard disk leaving the old MS DOS as the only HDD. MS DOS booted fine from the old HDD and did all internal commands like dir, type, copy etc but hung up on all .exe files - sacndisk, qbasic, fox, foxpro, ws etc., I then booted from a DOS Boot Floppy and now all .exe files worked fine, except the inevitable time-lag of the processor looking up command.com in the slower FDD each time I gave a command fom the command line or via MS DOS Batch files. I then used sys.com in the FDD to transfer the system to the C:\ drive. Now command.com in the FDD and the C:\ on the HDD had the same size and date stamp. Yet when I rebooted fom the hard drive - cold and hot, the .exe files did not work and the system hung! Can anybody help Plsss! Googol Thanx in advance!!
Welcome to HWF There could be two possibilities. Either the floppy disk is broken (try a different floppy disk) or the data cable of your FDD is broken.
Thanx RGochstenbach for a prompt reply! I have tried a new floppy and a new floppy cable - the problem persists. The problem occurs only when I boot from the hard disk - even with the floppy drive disconnected. No problem when I boot from the floppy! How long can I go on booting from the Floppy - commands and programs run very slow since the system seeks command.com from the floppy for every execution - even though I have command.com in the hard disk too. Moreover, floppy drives and floppy disks are very unreliable over long term - Track 0 Bad, Read error,write error, sector not found, General Failure etc., and floppy drive itself becoming defective soon - needless to mention their getting phased out and obsolete and hence difficult to buy anew! Plsss help!
So if I read it correctly, you've transferred the hard drive from your MS-DOS computer to the newer computer. Is this correct? In that case the only possible cause is the data communication between the hard drive and the motherboard. You could try a different IDE data cable. Does your hard drive have a label attached on the top of the drive casing? What information does it show?
