HI, So I tried to format a floppy under ubuntu and it took for ever and never did work. So I assumed the OS so I cause formating under linux has always been sketchy for me at least. So I tried to make a boot disk 98se on a win machine and boot it off that machine first (which was succesful) and then boot it off this cicero box which is a fancy case with a gigabyte mobo in it and a generic floppy. (This did not work) So I assumed bad connection or bios setting. DLed the manual for mobo and checked the floppy interface ribbon direction. (GOOD) Then checked to make sure the "flipped" end of the cord was facing the floppy drive. (GOOD) And I also ensured that the ribbon was on pin 1 and red on the floppy. And I cleared the bios and set it to fail safe and to optimized and checked what I thought could be wrong settings. (Seemed good) There is a spot to check floppy and what disk density but it does not say if it hooked up or not like if you unplug the drive it does not gray out. So I tried using different floppy drives and a different ribbon the ribbon was old school like to hook multiple floppies together, but I kept the main end in the machine and still put the floppy drive or the twisted end. I still cannot load the win 98 boot disk. I also have the latest bios form the mobo manufacturer. Could the interface be damaged? The light does go on and off like it should be reading it. And if I flip the cord the light stays on. The reason I mentioned the cicero name on such a generic box is that they actually have a website that has drivers bios and all that for the OS that came on the box. Should I use this bios? I seems fairly outdated. And I have added new dl dvd drives and sata hdd to this box so that's why I updated the bios. Everything else works great. Any help would be very nice. Cause I am very stumped. You know what sucks. Is when people answer posts with assumptions.

Probably a bad floppy drive.

Indeed - floppy support is pretty basic to computers, and having the 'latest & greatest' BIOS update would not be a factor "This did not work" Not exactly a detailed explanation - things "don't work" in myriad ways I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

Sorry I should have said that I tried three different floppy drives in this box I was quite tired when I posted. Sorry This did not work was meaning that the machine was unable to read the drive and boot into DOS or whatever it is. It did not start the computer. But the light does come on. You know what sucks. Is when people answer posts with assumptions.

Make sure the floppy controller is enabled in cmos/bios setup. Make sure the drive is properly identified in cmos/bios setup. Make sure the floppy drive is the first boot device in cmos. One bad drive can ruin a good disk so you may need to reformat and make a new bootdisk or at least check it in the second computer. When you attempt to boot up the computer with the bootdisk what error message do you get?

I don't get an error message and I tried all the things you are saying cause it one drive did corrupt the floppy once so I made a new one and disabled all boot devices except floppy and tried to boot the box. Nothing and the box STILL booted from the hdd, even though it was disabled. And I put the disk back in the win box to see if it became corrupted again. And it had not. Also my box never tells me during the post about the floppy just the pm.ps,sm ans secondary slave. Also the sata interfaces when they are enabled. Even if it where perhaps my bios was flakky wouldn't the drive work well once the OS took over. Thanks for all replies. You know what sucks. Is when people answer posts with assumptions.

Disconnect the hard drive and then see if it'll boot from the floppy drive.