IBM 5150 (how to tell if it is trying to boot from disk)

[Mumfred]

Hi everyone, I am new to the forum. I have pieced together an IBM 5150 over these last two years and fired it up yesterday.
Everything worked well in the beginning, the hard drive even fired up!
Though the HD only fired up once, and I swapped it out with the appropriate B floppy drive.

I then took my old copy of dos 2.10 and tried to copy it over to the b drive. Now it will not boot from A at all.
My question is this, if the disk is ruined would the pc tell me there was a disk read error?
It just boots up to basic, but the drive looks like it is trying to read.

 

[modem7]

Hi everyone, I am new to the forum.

Welcome to these forums.

Now it will not boot from A at all.
My question is this, if the disk is ruined would the pc tell me there was a disk read error?

Assuming a bad floppy, it depends where the damage is:

Looking at the boot process in the power-on self test (POST) of the IBM 5150, it will attempt four times to read the first sector (the boot sector) of the floppy. After four unsuccessful attempts, the POST simply jumps to Cassette BASIC. So if the first sector is damaged, there will be no error message.

If the first sector is good, DOS will start to load. There may be an error presented during that loading sequence.

Have you tried swapping your A: and B: drives ?

 

[Mumfred]

Welcome to these forums.


Assuming a bad floppy, it depends where the damage is:

Looking at the boot process in the power-on self test (POST) of the IBM 5150, it will attempt four times to read the first sector (the boot sector) of the floppy. After four unsuccessful attempts, the POST simply jumps to Cassette BASIC. So if the first sector is damaged, there will be no error message.

If the first sector is good, DOS will start to load. There may be an error presented during that loading sequence.

Have you tried swapping your A: and B: drives ?

I did swap them, and doing so boots up fine. The A drive is working sporadically, last night it worked for awhile until I ran diagnostics tests on it. It is allot quieter than the B drive. I oiled the rails and cleaned the heads, cannot tell what is off about it.

 

[SomeGuy]

Did the copy appear to succeed? You did use Diskcopy to copy it, right? If it succeeded, are both copies not working now?

Inspect the surface of the disks under a bright light, such as a flashlight, and see if there are any scratches or grooves now.