HELP! Lost the floppy drive on my new 8K5A3+

[Skiracer]

I just received and set up an Epox 8K5A3+ and 2600+ CPU. The first thing I did was to flash to the lastest BIOS from a boot floppy (meaning the floppy was working fine). I rebooted and set the BIOS to load defult settings, made the High point active, etc. When I tried to boot into Win2K, it locked (big suprise- I know, a clean install is preferred). Loaded the Win2K CD and booted into the setup program, went into recover previous installation, and tried to continue. When I went to load the Highpoint drivers, no access to the floppy. I've tried to access the floppy from Win98 (dual boot partition- works fine), and from the DOS prompt- no go. I replaced the floppy and the cable- no go. Does anyone know why the floppy might have disappeared? (I checked the IRQs in Win98 and the floppy controller is listed by itself on IRQ 6). Any other similar problems with this MB? TIA.

 

[Skiracer]

Any one? Every other MB feature works fine- just the floppy is dead. The BIOS POST even says "none detected" by the A: Floppy and B:Floppy line items. Is this an RMA issue at this point? Me thinks so......

 

[Fuzznuts]

i have similar issues with my board using the latest bios. it will give an error (40) on bootup saying floopy failed.

no biggie i guess the bios just needs a bit of fixing

if you wish to go back burn all the stuff you need to flash the bios onto cd and boot of that. www.bootdisk.com has loads of seperate boot cds to use. if flahing back to an older bios fixes the problem(it did with me) i wouldnt panic.

 

[AnandtechViolator]

disconnect the HDD and see if the unit will boot from the floppy only.

 

[Skiracer]

Thanks for the suggestions- I'll give the bootable CD BIOS change a try- I've already disconnected EVERYTHING else (except vid card with no success. I believe that it could be a BIOS issue, otherwise it must be a defective board.

 

[Skiracer]

Flashing to the very latest BIOS dated 11/10 WORKED! System up and running, now to try to OC! Thanks guys!