I only had a short amount of time to play with the computer today, but thanks to a very knowledgable friend, I got a known-good DOS 6.2 image with some disk utilities written to a floppy and booted.

The image was provided as a 1.44MB floppy image, so at least I could be sure to bypass the requirement of having a 1.2MB-capable 3-mode floppy drive. My Catweasel again choked on writing it out, with lots of errors throughout the write.

DiskImage 1.3b, a recommended utility for writing PC98 images to disk, also choked and failed the write. After thinking about it for awhile, I first reformatted the floppy disk from Windows as a regular 300rpm 1.44MB¹ (format /f:1440) and then restarted the DiskImage process. This time, it succeeded, and I was able to boot to MS-DOS 6.2 on this computer for the first time.

I don’t understand the Catweasel internals well enough to speculate, but I will anyway. Perhaps there was some low-level format issue on the disk that could not be overcome by either tool until it got a fresh format. It worked great making Amiga floppies, but those are all written to 720K double-density disks that were already in MS-DOS format.

From now on, I will try to format high-density disks before imaging them. I will update this post if I ever figure out what the problem with the Catweasel was.

1. Although it now no longer works in modern Windows, you used to be able to specify 360rpm, 1.2MB 2HD formats using (format /t:1232.) ↩