DOS Compatibility Card in a Macintosh 7300/166 cannot boot from Floppy

[gonzo]

Hello,

on a fresh installed Mac 7300 (MacOS 9.1 with PC Setup 2.1.7) my DOS compatibility card is unable to boot from the floppy drive. Already tested three different drives with a DR-DOS 7.03 floppy which is known to work for different real PeeCees.

When I insert the floppy while the PC is inactive, MacOS prompts to format or eject the floppy.

What could be wrong here? Is an extension missing?

Is it possible to boot the PC part from CD-ROM or an image (e.g. floppy dd/raw image or ISO file)?

Greetings

Florian

 

[Cory5412]

A default installation of OS 9 is able to read a DOS formatted floppy, so I am suspecting either a bad diskette or one of the floppy drives involved needs cleaning.

The other thing I'd do is use an image of a regular DOS 6.22 or a Windows 95 installation floppy, 

This page also has a starter boot disk image and a Windows 98 install floppy which may work: https://modelrail.otenko.com/apple/power-mac-7200-pc-compatibility

 

[Gorgonops]

Can the Mac read/write/format native floppies? That's the first thing to verify. Mac and PC 1.44mb floppies use the same physical MFM sector format, so if it can read Mac floppies you can at least rule out a hardware issue on that side.

 

[sstaylor]

One thing to be aware of too is that if a floppy drives heads are out of alignment, it may be able to read and write its own disks, but be unable to read the disks from a properly aligned drive and vice-versa.

 

[gonzo]

It's always the same drama, floppies work best if they are emulated :-(

I found a bootable harddisk image to get the initial setup of my disk image done and installed it this way.

https://modelrail.otenko.com/category/apple/page/2

BTW: fdisk.exe from MS-DOS cannot set MBR and bootable flag for the second disk so I used the fdisk.exe from FreeDOS to do this task.

Regards

Gonzo