Hi, this minor problem turned into a major one very quickly. In the bios, there's an option to set boot priority, it has, "first boot device: Floppy," and you can select which drive boots and it has a second and third option also. My problem ios that NO MATTER WHAT I put in the bios, it refuses to boot from the floppy drive. It seems to have no problem detecting a CDROM drive without a proper driver, as with the win98 setup boot disk in, nothing happened, and said "BOOT FROM CDROM: NON-SYSTEM DISK OR SOMETHING OR OTHER." So I put the win98 cd in, and it seemed to read it, I selected boot with cd support, switched to A: and used fdisk to create an active partition. That's the funny thing, it sees the FDD and can read from it (that's where fdisk came from) but will not boot from it no matter how I set the boot priority in the bios (even if I completely disable cdrom from the three options, it will try), and I guess it doesn't have a problem booting from the harddrive either, because now that I have an active partition, it just stops after "Verifying DMI Pool Data" with a big "Missing operating system" message. So, now, I can't do anything since it won't boot from the floppy. Does anyone have any idea of why the bios is ignoring what I enter? It seems unlikely that the floppy is defective since the bios sees it, the computer reads from it, and files will execute just fine. I checked all the connections, I can't find any jumpers or any switches on the motherboard that force it to boot from the cdrom or anything like that. I have a chilling feeling that it might be the bios and I'll have to send the motherboard back in because that's the only thing that makes sense to me, but it will be an extreme pain because I ordered it online and it will probably take a month or two to get in, get serviced or replaced, and get mailed back, and I want to have some hope that there is a solution otherwise. So, any ideas? Please email me if you have a good idea of what the problem might be since I'm checking on so many forums and faq sites that I might forget this one.

I forgot to say, the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-7VAX with onboard LAN and audio devices. Just in case these have a reputation or something.

Have you tried another boot floppy?

Interesting. I have the same motherboard and the exact same problem. You're farther along than I am; I haven't tried to boot from CD yet. I think the reason it appears to not accept your changes to BIOS is because a setting in the BIOS is set to not report floppy errors (I'm at work and don't have access to the board right now or I'd give you the exact setting.) I was having the same problem you were...I'd change to boot from floppy and it would appear to go directly to CD. When I changed the setting described above, I got an error on the floppy. All I've done is so far is to switch out the floppy with another new one - same error. I also tried a new (different) cable - same error. My next step is to try a different video card - PCI perhaps instead of AGP. Anyway, good luck. I hope we both get this resolved.