"Big problems reading that disk!" when trying to install Ultimate Doom

I don't know what's going on, all my floppies are basically brand new. Can someone help out? (it even shows files in the directory too)

Brand new floppy, wtf?

5 minutes ago, Vorpal said:

Brand new floppy, wtf?

I looked at them and they were pretty much never used.

1 hour ago, dickkickem said:

all my floppies are basically brand new

There's no such thing in 2018. Floppy disks have a limited life span for written data and all of them will eventually demagnetize, at different times and rates. This happens regardless of use and storage. You need to rewrite floppy disks every once in a while to maintain/refresh their data.

You could try CHKDSK on that diskette, but yeah, time will eventually destroy all magnetic storage devices...

23 minutes ago, scorpion said:

You could try CHKDSK on that diskette, but yeah, time will eventually destroy all magnetic storage devices...

No errors with ScanDisk.

A floppy disk is fairly difficult to damage physically (i.e. bad sectors) but incredibly easy to corrupt (i.e. perfectly readable, but nonsense, data). Checksums will verify the latter, but I don't know if anyone has a known-good checksum on whackass doom installer files.

This might seem like a dumb question but can you copy the contents of the of all the floppy disks to the HDD and then run the installer from there? I don't know if this would work because of the multi disk install setup. I copied all the contents of my Hexen CD to my HDD before installing the game and it worked just fine. If that does not work you can always blow into it.

10 hours ago, Halfblind said:

If that does not work you can always blow into it.

I wonder how many people won't get the joke.

10 hours ago, Halfblind said:

This might seem like a dumb question but can you copy the contents of the of all the floppy disks to the HDD and then run the installer from there? I don't know if this would work because of the multi disk install setup.

I think if you create disk images in separate places (i.e., different directories such as "Disk 1" "Disk 2" and so on) on the HDD, I think it should work.

12 hours ago, dickkickem said:

I don't know what's going on, all my floppies are basically brand new. Can someone help out? (it even shows files in the directory too)

Do you keep an old laptop around running Windows 98/NT just for the purpose of running vanilla Doom (and other games from that era) from a DOS prompt? Or do you have another reason?

2 hours ago, Pegleg said:

Do you keep an old laptop around running Windows 98/NT just for the purpose of running vanilla Doom (and other games from that era) from a DOS prompt? Or do you have another reason?

Kinda, I just really like vintage hardware, but I do like general DOS games at the same time, and I have a decent collection of them. If I find some old hardware for a good price (the laptop was around $40) then I'll pick it up and give it ago. 

That and most of everything I own is extremely outdated, I have more floppies than I do have CDs around my house, and I need something to read them and all my other older files that have been laying around for almost 2 decades. 

1 hour ago, dickkickem said:

Kinda, I just really like vintage hardware, but I do like general DOS games at the same time, and I have a decent collection of them. If I find some old hardware for a good price (the laptop was around $40) then I'll pick it up and give it ago. 

 

That and most of everything I own is extremely outdated, I have more floppies than I do have CDs around my house, and I need something to read them and all my other older files that have been laying around for almost 2 decades. 

OK. Nothing wrong with that.

You may want to, if you haven't already done so, convert some of those older storage media to something more modern. You like vintage hardware, so maybe you like vintage media also, but you may want to at least back up those floppy drives on to a flash drive or DVD-R or CD-R or external HDD or something so you don't lose them. You may have already done this, in which case, kudos, knock yourself out.

You can try removing and reinserting the floppy, and trying again. This causes the disk to land in a slightly different place, which just may help align it better. If you're lucky, you might get one good read, though it's a long shot.