Question:
Man, this is embarrassing I can't even get a boot disk to boot up. I
am using a tyan 1590s board with an amd 500 and about 240megs of ram.
I have tried 3 floppy drives including a new one and 3 different boot
disks. I keep getting an error message that reads: DISK BOOT FAILURE,
INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. I did that repeatedly and still it
won't boot up. Any ideas?
Answer:
First thing I'd want to know is, how is your BIOS setup configured
with respect to the Boot Disk options?
It should be set to A, then C, then CD-ROM, at least until
you get this sorted out.
Second thing I'd want to know is, when you tried 3 different floppies,
did you also try a different, known-good floppy cable?
Third, are you sure that at least one of those floppy drives is reliable?
Fourth, what's the reason for that unusual RAM count?
Is your system stealing 16 MB out of 256 MB RAM
for onboard video support?
I checked the bios and it is set to boot a, then c, then the cdrom. I
haven't been doing anything with the bios anyway. I made the boot disk
from another computer using windows 98. The boot disk will work on
that computer. When it is on the computer I am trying to boot up it I
can hear the floppy working but still get the error message. Thanks
for the help.
I don't know what's been happening as you swapped drives multiple
times. There is something I DIMLY recall about one of the cables to the floppy. The red strip on the
data cable... God... I think it must be positioned oppositely than that of an HDD, i.e., the red is
farther from the device.
It could be visa versa. It could be it's a CD cable I'm thinking about. Sorry, I can't be more
specific. But, I'm sure someone else will remember this... Candlin?
