Cannot see C: drive when booting from floppy (under DOS 6.2)

[inakito]

Computer: Toshiba T5200.
Hard disk: 200MB
DOS 6.2

When I boot from a floppy disk I cannot see the drive C:.
If I a execute FDISK from the floppy, the partition table shown is an absolute mess.
When I boot from the hard disk drive however, FDISK shows a nice partition table with one partition of 200MB.

One thing to note is that I am unable to create the boot floppy disk from the Toshiba itself. So I have used a boot floppy disk created in a different PC.
The diskette boots fine and I can use any command on the floppy disk itself, but I cannot see the C: drive, probably because the DOS is unable to see a proper partition table.

Does this problem have any meaning for anyone ?

 

[luvit]

After booting to floppy try the VER command.
Then boot to Hard Disk and type VER again. compare the output. What differences in VER do you see?
try FDISK /STATUS after a floppy boot and then again after a hard disk boot. See what kind of differences you see.
Hope this helps narrow-down the problem.

 

[deathshadow]

It may have been set up with a custom partition system -- some realtime disk compression software often had that effect. Superstor for example (one of my favorites for 286) was completely inaccessible if you booted from a floppy that didn't load the driver.

 

[Stone]

It may have been set up with a custom partition system -- some realtime disk compression software often had that effect. Superstor for example (one of my favorites for 286) was completely inaccessible if you booted from a floppy that didn't load the driver.

Good point. But, did you mean SpeedStor? I use that but I don't use the driver so a floppy boot can also read the hard disk. I just use it to format 'resistant' HDs. I can't figure out what the driver is really needed for since it always works without it. Of course I don't FDISK the drive with SpeedStor -- I use DOS' FDISK for that so I won't need any extra drivers.

But If you really do mean SuperStor, it gives a message at boot time to press a key if you want to boot from a floppy so that it can load the compression driver(s) before it reads the floppy boot disk. So he should have seen that message at *every* boot attempt, be it hard or floppy.

Bottom line... the OP should examine/post the contents of the startup files (autoexec.bat and config.sys).

 

[luvit]

It may have been set up with a custom partition system -- some realtime disk compression software often had that effect. Superstor for example (one of my favorites for 286) was completely inaccessible if you booted from a floppy that didn't load the driver.

Awe gee, you're probably spot-on with compression software. I hated those and I hated drive overlays.
I'm most familiar with the drive overlays that were to overcome drive size limitations within the BIOS.. those would make FDISK look pretty messed-up.
Between compression software and BIOS drive size limitations, I hated both pretty bad. The special software would get in my way, probably more than I can remember.