Does the floppy drive LED light up during startup? It should, whether or not the HDD works, and you should be able to boot from a floppy, even with a dead HDD. Therefore if a boot disk doesn't work, either your floppy system is defunct or it's in the motherboard. An easy fix -- which doesn't always work -- is to disconnect and replace all cables. It's fairly easy -- pull cables one end at a time *only*, so you don't forget where they went. Each device has 2 things going into it...a flat (usually, grey, sometimes blue) ribbon cable, for the data; and a power cable. Both are keyed, so you can't put them in backwards. Trace the data cable from the floppy(ies) back to the controller card, and pull & replace. Those are usually pins, and *can* be replaced backwards, so take care. You can swap the controller card into another slot -- any slot should work. If all slots are filled, exchange two cards. Chips work their way out of their sockets ("chip creep"); push every socketed chip back in. I have boxes of cables, controller cards and drives if you need any; e-mail me. If the floppy disk does its thing, are you sure the floppy itself is OK? It must be low density (you can tell by the hub ring) and have the proper files; try booting another machine with it. Not all DOS's will work on all machines -- I've even seen some older machines that won 't boot under DOS 6.x