I tried capturing the floppy images that I made in Virtual PC 2004, did a Atl+Crtl+Del, but I got a "Non system disk or disk error. Replace and strike any key when ready."

I tried renaming the disks to "disk1, etc" (all caps), rebooted VPC, but got same result - what gives?

How did you make the floppy images? Did you start with DOS floppies?

"Non system disk or disk error" with a floppy disk usually means your disk isn't bootable.

Yes, I originally had DOS diskette images, and I used WinImage to create 3.5" DOS floppies from these original images, but now I don't know what happened to these original images, so I used the 3.5" DOS floppies that I created from the original images to create these new images. Is that why they aren't bootable, or what?

EDIT - Since I gave away my original DOS diskettes in '09, and I think I lost my dos622 diskette images that I had 18 months ago, I found (and bought) these DOS 6.22 diskettes on ebay just now (amazon had 1 copy selling for used $69, new for $100, these diskettes (they look like they're brand new) on ebay cost $20 + 8 S&H.


DOS622 diskettes from ebay

I hope I did the wise thing here, buying these diskettes, as these images I made weren't bootable.

The way to make a DOS installation disk set is to make the first disk bootable and then copy over the files that are supposed to go on the disk. Disks 2 and 3 don't have to be bootable.

You can make a floppy disk bootable by using the command:

SYS A:

on a formatted disk. Alternatively you could use:

FORMAT A: /S

on an unformatted disk.
You could also use FORMAT A: /S on a formatted disk, but you'd have to wait for it to format, which takes more time than simply using SYS A: .

This works on Windows 98 and earlier. I'm not sure about XP and later.

You'd make images of the bootable floppy disk -- and they'd have to be the type of image that would be recognized as a floppy image. I'm not sure what software you used to make the images.

Here are some links about the SYS and FORMAT commands:

http://www.computerhope.com/syshlp.htm
http://www.computerhope.com/formathl.htm

The disks you bought from eBay should work fine. I'm not sure if buying them was necessary though.