compaq lte 286 system setup disk

Hi Folks:
I can't find a good 720K floppy to save my life. I changed the
bios battery on this computer, and now the hard drive doesn't boot.
I've used a bulk eraser to wipe about a dozen disk that wouldn't format
cleanly, and two of them seemed to format (720k) on a newer computer,
running DOS 6.2. At least it had all it's reported space. Running the
QRST.EXE with DIAGS80B._01 , I can hear it having problems with a
couple of tracks on the disk. In the end it says the checksums don't
match. Could I have a bad image? I can't even format in the compaq.
It claims something wrong with that floppy drive type. I don't know if
a high density formatted to 720 will work at all..
Thanks for any help.
Harry

"HarryHydro" <> writes:
> couple of tracks on the disk. In the end it says the checksums don't
> match. Could I have a bad image? I can't even format in the compaq.
> It claims something wrong with that floppy drive type. I don't know if
> a high density formatted to 720 will work at all..
> Thanks for any help.

You can format HD disks to 720 at some loss in reliability. You might
try doing the format on an HD drive. I probably have some 720's in a
box someplace but I have no hope of finding them anytime soon.

It probably can't hurt to run a cleaning disc through the compaq drive.

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "HarryHydro" <> writes:
> > couple of tracks on the disk. In the end it says the checksums don't
> > match. Could I have a bad image? I can't even format in the compaq.
> > It claims something wrong with that floppy drive type. I don't know if
> > a high density formatted to 720 will work at all..
> > Thanks for any help.
>
> You can format HD disks to 720 at some loss in reliability. You might
> try doing the format on an HD drive. I probably have some 720's in a
> box someplace but I have no hope of finding them anytime soon.
>
> It probably can't hurt to run a cleaning disc through the compaq drive.

Hi Folks: I found what the problem is. The program, qrst.exe doesn't
like the images and the targets to be the same drive. I couldn't run
qrst on XP, so I scraped up an old Win98 drive, put it in, copied
qrst.exe and diags80b._01 on the hard drive, and ran it there, at the
DOS prompt (I started in DOS mode). The qrst program also didn't
indicate that the disc was created, but instead went to make another
one. I made two, then ESC to quit. Both 1.44meg floppies that I
plugged and formatted for 720k before this, was created and worked. My
Hard Drives Back! YYyaaaaayyyyyy!!!
Hydro