HP Vectra wont boot from floppy drive

[Windows95_2020]

Hello I need help with an HP Vectra VL Series 4 5/100 When a hard drive is plugged in I cant boot from the floppy drive I have a windows 95 setup floppy the hard drive is blank so it cant boot into anything I tried swapping jumpers but that didnt solve anything I went into the bios and disabled Boot from hard disk

All I get is a flashing dash mark in the upper right corner when I tried without the hard drive installed it booted to the windows 95 startup disk prompt just fine I dont know what to do

Thank You.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Windows95_2020 

I'll try to help you on this -- but I will admit that I remember almost nothing about a 25-year-old OS, so others might need to jump in here with a better memory.

Older PCs that came with floppy drives had their boot sequence in the BIOS set by default to have the floppy drive first.  So, unless you changed that, which you should not have done, you should not have had to mess with that.  Also, I would not disable booting from the hard drive; instead, I would change the drive boot order to have the floppy drive first and the hard drive second.

Additionally, I would personally have trouble trusting the integrity of a 25-year-old floppy disk. I would be surprised if it even still works. And unfortunately, I have no idea where you can even get a copy of Windows 95 now.

If you have another PC that can boot from floppies, I would try using this disk in one of those -- that will at least confirm if the floppy still works.

Sorry I don't have more ideas -- maybe others can add stuff I don't recall.

[Windows95_2020]

Sorry for the late reply, I got a 4gb drive now its booting off of the floppy disk and formatting correctly so I think the bios didn't recognize the 10gb,30gb, or 160gb drive becuase it was only showing up as 8.4gb or 8455mb with all of the other drives so the 4gb is under the bios limit now im guessing thats why it is working fine, Thank you for the reply