Remove disks or other media, press any key to restart. Dos 6.22 install fail

[lotsofspareparts]

Building a vintage laptop. Bought 6 rebranded Compal 486dx4 55mhz laptops and am making a few of them functional for something to do.

One of them I was able to do a clean install of Win95 and I want to install Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1 on one of the others.

Problem I am having is when I boot up with disk 1 of the 3 disk pack of Dos 6.22 I get the following message

Booting from floppy disk

Remove disks or other media
Press any key to restart

Bios is set to boot from floppy, and I have tried 2 different hard drives, one 347mb and one 543mb drive. Getting the same error message over and over.

When I try to boot using disk 2, it says "Starting MSDos" and then it hangs forever.

Hoping some of the vintage guys can chip in here and give me somewhere to start. It's been about 20 years since I goofed around with anything having to do with Dos or Fdisk or formatting. It's all coming back to me but this has me stumped!!

Jared

 

[ragnar-gd]

It looks rather that the machine does not work at all. A machine not even starting a dos install floppy has a problem.
Old floppy drives sometimes can't read floppys any more, because of $reasons. Misaligned heads, whatever.
Try one of the others from that heap of 20, perhaps?

 

[Alabalcho]

From your "Booting from floppy disk", "Remove disks or other media" it seems that it's the floppy drive which does not work, not the hard drives you keep replacing. You can try putting an already bootable hard drive in that laptop, but without a floppy, you'll have hard time moving anything on it.