One had the OS on it, another just formatted
with system files and the third nothing on it.

Lets be clear--when you say "nothing on it", you mean a blank drive--no
partitions, which also means not formatted, of course.
Mike has posted confusing information--in his first post indicated you ran
these diskettes after partitioning but before formatting, and in a later one
that you were to run these on a blank HDD. It needs to have no partitions,
ususally one does this with FDISK....

Dale