Acer V35 Mobo won't boot from floppy

[ljerry4]

Acer V35 Mobo won't boot from floppy drive. Just issues "Insert system diskette and press<enter> key to reboot" message.

Have tried several levels of MS-Dos, IBM-Dos & Win 95 boot disks. Have also tried known good floppy drive & cable as well as freshly formatted floppy diskette.

Does ACER require a proprietary system boot diskette??

Does anyone know what this ACER BIOS is looking for??

Lower left of screen shows:

ACR1BE-IO7-960408-R01-C0 Copyrite 1990-1996

BIOS panels show Bios V2.0 in upper left.

Thanks !

 

[Triple6]

A system disk is a boot disk - it can be be a floppy, cd-rom, harddrive. If its looking for one it sounds like it doesn't boot of the harddrive right? does it find a harddrive during post? Is this a system that you're building or one that just stooped working? In order to have it boot from a floppy, go into the bios setup during POST and set the boot order to something like A, CD-ROM, C. Do you know if the floppy drive worked before this happened?

 

[ljerry4]

This is a Mobo I just acquired to be used to flash acer bios chips. (The Acer AFLASH utility locks up on non-acer boards)

It has no harddrive or cd-rom as I only want to boot from a floppy.

I've disabled the harddrive as well as the cd-rom in the bios .

Bios is reading the diskette but (apparently) isn't liking what it finds.

I've switched to a known working floppy drive & cable from another computer. Cable is oriented correctly (no solid light) .

Diskette is newly formatted at 1.44 mb 7 bios is also set to 1.44mb.

Bios is finding the floppy at 1.44 for sure as I've truned on bios option to display device config.

Any other ideas??

 

[Triple6]

You didn't mention if it was set to boot from the floppy. Also are you sure that both ends of the cable aren't reversed? Does the light on the floppy come on during post because it should when the computer checks for one. Make sure the disk you are using is bootable, try it in another computer to make sure it works.

Why do you to flash Bios chips on it?

 

[ljerry4]

Sorry, yes it is set to boot only from A (actually it's the only choice offered when hard drive & cd-rom are disabled).

Yes the light comes on monentarily during post & then later (again momentarily) just before displaying the message I've described above.

Pressing enter makes it come on again momentarily before issuing another message (same one).

Why? I just want to get another acer mobo (that won't even enter bios setup) working by flashing a newer bios. (boot block not working on this other board either)

Is that somehow pertinent to solving my problem or were you just curious?

 

[Triple6]

just curious. Sounds like everything is set up correctly. If you hadn't tried another floppy drive thats all i could suggest, but you have tried that so i'm all out of ideas. Could you do what you want by booting from a CD-R with the flash on that?

Anyone else?