Here is how to do it. Find 5 different computers with 5 different OS's. 95,98,98se,me and xp. Take 5 floppies and one on each machine do an advanced scandisc on the floppies. This will rule out a bad floppy. Then on each machine go to the dos prompt and type in at c:\format a: /s exactly like that. Put the floppy in and hit enter. Each of these machines will put their system files onto each floppy. All that you will get is what is called a command prompt. Basically a c:\
I have had some of the same problems you are experiencing due to ????? maybe bad floppies, but sometimes it seems that one OS may write a disc from like 95 and it can't be read from another 95 but maybe it can be read from 98. It is strange sometimes how two machines with the same OS will not write to floppies well enough to communicate, but then on a different OS they will work fine. I have 4 computers set up at home right now and sometimes a disc that worked great as a bootup disk for 98 will just not read and the machine will tell me that it is not a system disk. I put it into another 98 machine and it works fine.
It does not matter what your OS is. The floppy booting before Hdd (check your bios to see that your floppy is first boot device and make sure boot up floppy seek is enabled, this will check your floppy for proper operation) will load the system files into memory and bypass the hdd alltogether. If it does not start reading, you can always reboot and keep pressing the ESC key until you get a menu that asks which device you would like to boot from. Then choose floppy. If you get it to read the floppy and it does not find it as a system disk, try one of the other disks you have made on one of the other OS's. One of these should work. Once you find one that works, put the flash utility and the .bin file on it. When you get to c:\, type in the .exe name of the flashutility, whatever that is. Then just follow directions, and LIKE IT SAYS, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ONCE IT STARTS WRITING THE BIOS.
Other than this, I don't know what to tell you. These directions were taught to me by my dad, who has been working in the computer field as a programmer and system analyst since they basically began.
To give you an idea of how long that is, he was working on computers 15 years before the apple computers came out. They still used reel to reel for harddrives. The computers were like the size of refirigerators or something. And if you think that an AMD machine is loud with all the fans to keep them cool, you should have heard those babies. They used to print on some kind of wierd silver paper that actually burned the text in. I remember when my dad brought home the first apple pc. I remember when asteroids came out for pc's and pacman. We had a vic20 and a commodore 64. There was the texas intruments and the amiga's. Then there was the atari 520st. It had a mouse! And a desktop! When I was in high school I did not even have to take the computer class because I knew enough programming to do all the stuff they were showing us how to do ( pixel painting ). Then out came win3.1 and I started partying. In the last few years my head is back into them. My pops has divulged a lot of OLD TIME info that still pertains to the enhanced dos of windows9x, so TRUST ME, make the system disk with format a: /s.
Sorry I went on there. Later
