At the college I attend, they thru away a bunch of old ibm compatible machines. One was setting on top of the dumpster so I got it out. It has a 2.88 mb disk drive in it. What kind of floppy diskette can I use in this drive to boot it with. 1.44 mb bootable dos diskette does not work. Is it anyway I can format a disk to use on this machine ? I like tinkering with old computers. It boots up and goes thru the post, beeps, and them gives me a non system disk or disk error.

I'd put a standard 1.44 drive in there if indeed it is something else. There's no real use for a 2.88 drive (since they never got very far,) and if it can't read standard 1.44 floppies it's not much use to you either. (Although them making a drive that goes above 1.44 but doesn't read 1.44 sounds a little cheesy to me. It may be just a bad drive anyway?) Maybe there'll be a nice, working 1.44 drive in that same dumpster. :) Oh, one more thing. You might take the drive apart and make sure it's ok. Sometimes those little metallic strips on the floppy get stuck and make the drive unusable.

Still good for the stepper motor even if the drive is screwed.

unless the stepper motor is screwed. hehe.

You are just like me, A while back ago i found a whole bunch of ibms from a middle school, these things were old, the ones you turn on by reaching around the right side to hit the swith and the front was black i think it was not even a 286, But if i was you, i'd go back to that dumpster and get every last computer part you see, I found a bunch of cords that hook up to the back of the computer to the outlet, (those are worth money and the drive cables, unfortunaly my mother threw it all away, reasonly I found an sort of up to date IBM 330-466DX2 computer with monitor in the school board warehouse dumpster, and had windows 3.1 on it, and it works perfect I it upgraded to windows 95, But anyways go back to that dumpster and get the rest of the computer stuff if there is any, I'm sure you will find a working floppy drive you will need to get the computer booted up....

I found out the problem, I was all wrong. It was a low density drive. A friend of mine told me you cannot put a high density disk in a low density drive which was what I was doing. He had some low density disk from about 9 years ago. Popped a bootable one in the machine & it booted up fine.

One more thing, Cindy. As Jon Fox pointed out a while back, you can make a 1.44MB disk into a 720K disk by simply covering the other hole (the one without the switch) with a piece of tape and formatting it as such (type "format /?" for the parameters necessary to format to a different type.) So if it's a 720K drive you don't need to borrow other peoples disks after all. :)

One last thing. Are you sure you're a girl? I thought they never admitted they were wrong...

Yes I am a girL. And I'm big enough to admit when I am wrong. And am open to all suggestions and ideas when I have a problem. Thank you very much!

You sure are no fun to pick on. :(

I am wong too.

Why hello Wong. Or should I call you "Mr. Wong"?

If you can find a recovery disk for a newer computer it can help you over ride the error and the dos system will possibly obey your commands. But anyway I experiment.