Remove the hard drive. Strange as it may seem, a dead hard drive can cause both floppy and CD boot
failure. Same goes for a bad CD-Drive and floppy as well so you might need to try each one
separately to resolve it.

Plus, since you're having problems with an 'unknown' system, meaning you've never seen it run, you
should not 'assume' that anything on it is cabled or jumpered correctly. I.E. check it all.





I agree with HD problem especially if the 'puter has been sitting for a while. What I ran into once
with a Compaq was the same thing. How I got it running was to lift the front of the pc up about 4 or
5" during boot up just before the error message and then drop it! The jolt got the drive spinning up
and it booted fine after that.
My computer was sitting in a unheated garage for a couple of months during cold weather and I didn't
care too much about it since I was using my "new" system in a heated house. Come to think of it I
might of dropped it a couple of times in rapid succession to get it going, either way I had nothing
to lose. (the PC repair guys are probable mad at me now for letting their biggest repair trick out
of the bag :-)

MrKoko