I'm working on a little celeron 400 for a friend. He can't figure out what her did. He wants me to reformat it & reinstall win98se But whenever we boot the pc, it won't go any further then "searching for boot records from floppy..Not found, "searching for boot records from IDE-0..OK" & this is where it stalls, all I get is a blinking cursor. I've tried using a win98 boot-disk But still I get nothing. I've even tried using my winxp CD but still I get nothing. The Bios is set right & during the setup it does see everything, CD, floppy, HHD,. One wierd thing, whenever there is a CD on the rom, the green lite is constantly on. Can someone please help me get past this & on with installing an OS.? Thanks so much, Maxx

Does the light stay on on the FDD? This would indicate cable upsidedown. It does not read from the floppy drive so something is wrong with the floppy drive/cable. Maybe flop drive is shot. Best

Yes, check all the cabling. It sounds like someone was messing around and got the cables in wrong.

When you attempt to boot from a bootdisk you say you 'get nothing'. But what exactly happens? Do you get an error message? Does the floppy drive appear to be reading the disk?

You say in bios configuration it finds the; 1.floppy 2 hd 3 cdrom drive If it finds them I would guess it must be able to talk to each. If the boot sector area of the HD is damaged or has some weird code it it, the hd won't find any files or boot sectors. The ide drive will be identifable from bios because the rom on controller on the drive itself will tell the bios what model and make the drive is. But if you can't write to the drive, it will never boot. Is this a replacement drive? If the same drive, did it have disk manager on it or some propriortiy program that would confuse recognizing it? If a 98se installation boot disk can't find a drive installed it will hop over and say no drive installed and boot from floppy. If the boot disk hangs, it is waiting to hear back from the hd before it goes to the next function. In deals like this, first get the system to boot from floppy, then reinstall the HD and cable to work on that to take an fdisk + format. Then the cd rom drive to talk correctly with the 98se install floppy.