Hello again Gents,
It's been awhile, but now I'm back to consult the HiveMind and see if there is an answer in here. BTW -- I did a forum search and could not find anything directly on point. That being said, I did find in a Net search very similar symptoms across a variety of boards (ASUS Giga-Byte, etc...), but with the NVIDIA being the common element.
SPECS
BioStar M7NCG400 AMD 2500 512 DDR
O/S and HDD doesn't seem to matter, since this all happens before they become operational.
INTERESTING NOTE:
Using a BootDisk floppy, I was able to get an 81GB MaxTor HDD recognized in BIOS, fdisked, formatted and even a basic install of Win98se on the HDD. Thus the malady is erratic, and does not happen every time.
SYMPTOMS
The machine goes through the boot process and takes its sweet-a$$ time about it. Ultimately you get the following lines just before the process comes to a grinding halt:
NVIDIA Boot Agent, PXE-2.0 (build 082 V1.82)
Copyright (C) 2001 NVIDIA Corporation
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media Test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent
Disk Boot Failure, Insert system Disk and Press Enter
This is odd because I checked the jumper configuration on the HDD and even its placement at the end of the primary IDE ribbon cable connector. Pin number 1 configuration is correct (heck, the connector is keyed to avoid just this thing).
Upon powering it up for the first time after installation, I hit DEL and allow the board to recognize the HDD and other devices connected to it, then reboot.
At first I thought that old NTFS partitions on the drive were causing the problem, so I hit the thing with DELPART, re-FDISKED it and formatted it again.
I used MaxTor's proprietary HDD formatting software to partition and format the drive and I still got a disk boot failure.
Then I wondered if 25GB partitions might be too large for Win98se to recognize (naahhh) and fdisked and reformatted them again, but this time to about 15.5 GB each, to minimize slack.
I also wondered if somehow the C:\ drive had not been made active, checking in FDISK, it was, and system files (COMMAND.COM) had been transferred to it.
I tried swapping out the ribbon cable connector, ensuring that it had the higher capacity blue connectors, rather than the older, black connectors.
Doesn't seem to make any difference.
Tried swapping out the MaxTor for an 80GB WD HDD.
This is a known good drive.
QUESTION
Could it be the BIOS / or corrupted IDE drivers?
Does anyone know of any known issues with NVIDIA Boot Agent?
Thanks for any good advice you can impart.
K.J.
OUT
hardware
prices 
