i've tried 3 new floppy drives and upon boot-up, display gives the invalid system disk error, remove disk and strike any key to continue. there is, of course, no floppy in the drives. does that mean that the connector ribbon is no good? or is it something worse? thanks.

I had this problem when I deleted a few important system files. So it might not even be your floppy drive. I'd pop ina boot disk and see what happens.

Here are some possibilities 1)your floppy drive controller could be dead. Can be fixed by buying an I/O controller card and disabling everything on the card but the floppy drive. If this computer has ISA slots, a used controller card can be found on EBAY for cheap. I generally buy them used, in bins in the computer store for $5 U.S.. The last new PCI controller card I bought was around $40 U.S.. 2)Ribbon cables can go bad, you could try picking up a new one. 3) Is stripe on ribbon cable lined up with pin 1 of Floppy drive? 4)If you have an older ribbon cable, make sure that you have the floppy drive attached to the connector after the twist. If is attached after the twist now, try it before the twist. 5) IRQ conflict with another device-not real likely since the floppy controller generally uses IRQ 6 so most installations stay away from that.

That error means that none of the devices in your Bios boot list is bootable. Your hard drive is corrupt and there is either no diskette in the floppy drive or it is also corrupt.

Go to your bios and change the settings to boot on the C drive. greg