[vox-tech] floppy madness

[Peter Jay Salzman]

I bought an 80GB drive for an old dual PII motherboard (Gigabit
GA-6BXD).  Ultimate goal is to move a previous Linux installation which
is currently on a failing drive onto the new drive.

BIOS can't detect the new drive at all.  It hangs on autodetection.

Googling revealed that I need to update the BIOS of the motherboard to
recognize drives greater than 64GB.


I have win95 on a floppy.  Goal is to boot win95 and run the executable
that upgrades BIOS.

The trouble is, BIOS won't boot off the floppy.  It doesn't even
recognize the floppy drive at boot.

   * I moved the floppy to another, newer, computer and it booted off
     the win95 floppy just fine.

   * Cabling is good.  Switching the ribbon around, the drive light
     doesn't go off, which means I had it right the first time.

   * I set BIOS to boot off of "A" first.

   * BIOS floppy autodetect is set to "enabled".

   * It appears that the computer doesn't even *attempt* to read the
     floppy at boot.

   * When I boot Linux, I can mount the floppy with no problems.  I just
     can't boot off it.

   * In Linux, I used dd to copy and create a new win95 floppy, just in
     case the problem is that the drive couldn't read the floppy made by
     another drive.  Didn't work.  But considering the computer doens't
     even make the attempt to read the floppy, I'm not surprised.

I'm ready to get a new, smaller, drive.  Before I do, any suggestions on
what could be preventing booting off the win95 floppy?

Pete

PS- Gigabyte sucks.  Their motherboards are decent, but their website
crashes galeon and causes havoc and chaos with Opera.  Completely
non-functional.

-- 
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.  -- Albert Einstein
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