Boot problems

[Arkaine23]

I get an invalid media. Insert system disk error when I try to boot my new computer from disk. I checked the orientation of the floppy cable. I scandisk'd my 2 boot disks (Win 98SE & Win Me). I set my bios to fail-safe defaults. Floppy set to boot 1st, swapping is disabled. Bios didn't detect the drive, so I set it as 1.44 MB. I even used a 2nd IDE cable. I tested the FDD in another machine and it worked. Could the problem be with my motherboard?

I had to make a bootable cd to run fdisk and format for my HDD. Now I want to install Win2k, but I can't get the setup disks to read. Can I put those 4 disks onto one bootable cd, or do I have to make 4 separate cd's?

Specs:

Shuttle AK31 v3.1 (most current bios), XP 1600+, PC2700 DDR 256MB, WD 40 Gig HDD, Mitsumi 1.44 Floppy

[flounder43]

Check that floppy cable again. What does the bios say? 1.44 floppy?...Make sure of that. Those cables can be tricky.

Try a new boot disk from bootdisk.com. They work, and you can rule out any other probs. Figure your floppy probs first, before you try to do move them all to CD.

Have you just tried to boot from your CD drive with the windows disk? That should be your first move.

[Arkaine23]

I'm going to try (again) to flip my floppy cable on both ends and see if that helps. Floppy is set to 1.44 MB. I had to set it myself since Bios didn't configure it. Have made use of bootdisk.com for bootdisks (that's also how I learned to make bootable cd's). Windows cd I have is copied (Oh My!) and not bootable.

I built a budget system with the same motherboard a few days ago, and I had the FFD cables backwards, but it only took a minute to fix. I think the mobo manual and PCB have the FDD cable pin 1 marked wrong. I spent hours trying all different configurations, but I was frustrated and kept messing with the bios at the same time. I think I'll do it more systematically this morning. I really hope it's just something stupid like a backwards cable.

[Arkaine23]

problem solved