Vintage Toshiba 740CDT Floppy Drive

Strongit · February 14, 2021

I have a unique situation on my hands that will eventually need fixing. I inherited an old Toshiba laptop for playing old windows 98 and DOS games on but the floppy drive has died. Right now it's not an issue however with how fickle windows 98 is it's going to be a problem at some point when it needs to be reinstalled.

The machine will only boot from either the floppy or the hard drive so right now it's impossible to reinstall windows on it. I have taken out the hard drive and created a backup ISO however I can't boot from a different drive after putting the backup image on it. My options are either to find a replacement floppy drive which I can't find for under $100 or figure out a way to make this ISO bootable. I have already taken apart the floppy and greased everything but the motor is completely seized. Any suggestions?

Radium_Angel · February 14, 2021

15 minutes ago, Strongit said:

I have a unique situation on my hands that will eventually need fixing. I inherited an old Toshiba laptop for playing old windows 98 and DOS games on but the floppy drive has died. Right now it's not an issue however with how fickle windows 98 is it's going to be a problem at some point when it needs to be reinstalled.

The machine will only boot from either the floppy or the hard drive so right now it's impossible to reinstall windows on it. I have taken out the hard drive and created a backup ISO however I can't boot from a different drive after putting the backup image on it. My options are either to find a replacement floppy drive which I can't find for under $100 or figure out a way to make this ISO bootable. I have already taken apart the floppy and greased everything but the motor is completely seized. Any suggestions?

There exist USB floppy drives that aren't seen by SOME BIOS models as a floppy drive, rather than a USB device. Unfortunately, I'm not certain yours will see it as such, without buying and trying.

The other option is buy a floppy drive and transfer the guts into the Toshiba's drive and go from there

Strongit · February 14, 2021

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

There exist USB floppy drives that aren't seen by SOME BIOS models as a floppy drive, rather than a USB device. Unfortunately, I'm not certain yours will see it as such, without buying and trying.

The other option is buy a floppy drive and transfer the guts into the Toshiba's drive and go from there

It's looking more and more like I'll either need to repair this floppy or get a new one regardless of cost. The laptop itself is too old to have a USB port so that's out. I just wish I could make the drive with the ISO on it bootable.

PwnyTheTiger · February 14, 2021

If you can get to a dos prompt natively, through emulation with the drive you intend to throw in the old machine you can format it, run fdisk to make the proper partitions AFTER using format /s to format the drive and make it bootable. Then try throwing the backup image on, but without the MBR transferring over (it might or might not be) I'm not sure if it would work anyways.

Otherwise....

Attach hard drive as only drive to newer PC.
Boot off DOS floppy/cd/USB/something to get into DOS. The other commenter provided a way to make a bootable DOS usb stick, but there's plenty similar.
If you already have a functional partition/etc on the drive you can skip this part. Use fdisk to create the partition on it and make sure it's set active. DOS fdisk has an annoying limitation that only the primary drive can be set bootable/active, which is why you have to have it as the only drive
If it's a new partition, format /s the new partition such that it can boot DOS itself. If it's an existing partition, you can use sys on it.
Now we need to get the Win98 cab files on it. If you have no CD or anything burnable, you can set things up such that Windows 7 boots again and have the to-be-Win98 drive as a secondary drive.
Extract a Windows 98 ISO from somewhere like winworldpc.com and copy the entire win98 directory to the to-be-Win98 drive.
Pop the drive back in the Win98 computer and get booted to DOS on it. From there you can run Windows 98 setup and bob's your uncle.

Used to do this all the time back in the day for machines with no CD-ROM drive, but you're going to need a way to boot DOS natively on the new box ideally. You can possibly also use something like Virtualbox or QEMU and hardware passthrough of the drive to do it, but we're starting to get into multiple levels of complication with that and it's best avoided.

Strongit · February 14, 2021

3 hours ago, PwnyTheTiger said:

If you can get to a dos prompt natively, through emulation with the drive you intend to throw in the old machine you can format it, run fdisk to make the proper partitions AFTER using format /s to format the drive and make it bootable. Then try throwing the backup image on, but without the MBR transferring over (it might or might not be) I'm not sure if it would work anyways.

Otherwise....

Attach hard drive as only drive to newer PC.

Boot off DOS floppy/cd/USB/something to get into DOS. The other commenter provided a way to make a bootable DOS usb stick, but there's plenty similar.

If you already have a functional partition/etc on the drive you can skip this part. Use fdisk to create the partition on it and make sure it's set active. DOS fdisk has an annoying limitation that only the primary drive can be set bootable/active, which is why you have to have it as the only drive

If it's a new partition, format /s the new partition such that it can boot DOS itself. If it's an existing partition, you can use sys on it.

Now we need to get the Win98 cab files on it. If you have no CD or anything burnable, you can set things up such that Windows 7 boots again and have the to-be-Win98 drive as a secondary drive.

Extract a Windows 98 ISO from somewhere like winworldpc.com and copy the entire win98 directory to the to-be-Win98 drive.

Pop the drive back in the Win98 computer and get booted to DOS on it. From there you can run Windows 98 setup and bob's your uncle.

Used to do this all the time back in the day for machines with no CD-ROM drive, but you're going to need a way to boot DOS natively on the new box ideally. You can possibly also use something like Virtualbox or QEMU and hardware passthrough of the drive to do it, but we're starting to get into multiple levels of complication with that and it's best avoided.

I'll give that a try. In the meantime I did more in depth surgery on the floppy drive and discovered it's not the motor I thought it was and it may just need a new belt (8" x 1/16"). Going to start looking for a new one and in the meantime do some partitioning. Thanks.