Boot Record from Floppy - Not Found

[ajaplin]

Can anyone help me?

I am building my first pc from the following components:

Gigabyte GA-7VKML with VIA KM266 chipset
AMD athlon XP1800+ processor
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus8 UDMA133 30GB Hard Drive
TEAC 1.44Mb Floppy Drive
Crucial 256Mb 184pin DIMM PC2100 DDR RAM

I will eventually be using a Freecom FS-1 USB CD-RW when I have the rest of the system running.

I have assembled all the components, with all cables apparently correctly connected, and successfully switched on and enterred the BIOS to confirm settings. The floppy and hard drives have both been correctly identified in the BIOS.

My problem arises when I exit the BIOS and attempt to continue to search for the Windows 98 SE boot disc. After exiting the BIOS, the screen clears and I get the following messages;

Searching for Boot Record from Floppy - not found
Searching for Boot Record from IDE 0 - not found
Searching for Boot Record from BBS - OK

The screen then clears again, and proceeds to what I assume is the LAN controller with:

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (Build082)
Copyright(c) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8139(X)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.12a (011210)
PXE-E61:Mediatest failure, check cable
PXE-MOF:Exiting PXE ROM

The computer then proceeds with:

Searching for Boot Record from SCSI - not found
Boot Failure
Reboot and select proper boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device
Press any key when ready

The Windows 98 SE Boot disc is ok as I can boot my laptop from it. I also created a fresh boot disc from my laptop, and this also does not work on the new pc.
The floppy and hard drive LEDs both light up when the system searches for them, and turn off again when no boot record can be found.

Any ideas????

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

do you have another floppy drive you can try? or possibly you can try to use the Win98 CD to boot? (You'll have to set it to boot from FDD0, CDROM then IDE0 in the BIOS.)

[ajaplin]

Wizzard,

I have tried an old floppy drive with the same results. I'll see if I can borrow a newer one from someone to try.
My CD is USB. Will I be able to boot from this if I haven't loaded any drivers for it?
If I am able to borrow another CD, install it, and boot from it, will the floppy drive still be accessible for copying data, even if I can't boot from it?

[Mr. Goodbytes]

I know you can activate legacy USB keyboard support in BIOS. Does that version offer legacy support of other USB devices?

[ajaplin]

I activated legacy USB support, and was able to boot from both USB floppy, and USB CD. Unfortunately, the USB CD does not have any DOS drivers, according to the manufacturers (Freecom), so I had to go out and buy a cheap CD-ROM, with DOS drivers, to load Windows. System is now up and running. Even the floppy drive has been sorted by swapping with a newer model than the one tried before. Strange thing is that the supposedly faulty floppy worked in the machine the replacement was taken from, so they remain swapped, and everyone is happy.

Spooky........