Asus A7N266-VM Help

[THICK]

I am building my first system with a ASUS A7N266-VM
mother board, AMD 2200 XP and 512 mb Kingston ram......
Have a burner,Maxtor 30g and floppy installed also....When I powered up the post went great with one short beep. But when I tried to boot up Win98se boot disk so I could install the OS it says I/O error...replace disk and try again....
I have tried 4 different boot disks and connected 2 different
floppy drives with the same result......I have also tried to boot
directly with the Win98 cd disk which is supposed to be bootable,
same error message.....
Have Maxtor on primary master and cd burner on secondary master....correctly identifed in the bios................
I'm lost.....
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thick

[skuz]

It says IO error for the floppy or when you try to access the HD ?

If it's your floppy drive, then from what I read you have tried 2 drives and a few floppies,so make sure your floppy drive is connected at the END of the cable, with the other end plugged on the motherboard. The middle plug is for a second floppy. If it doesn't work, try replacing the floppy cable, it looks like the only thing you haven't checked.

Even more basic thing to check : make sure that whatever you plan to use to boot up is listed FIRST in the boot sequence in your BIOS.

[THICK]

The floppy cable is new it came with the new floppy drive(generic).
The cable has only two plugs one for the mother board and one that only fits the drive....I have the floppy as being the first boot
device and I even changed it to the cd burner and tried to boot from the win98se cd.........
Are there any other settings in the bios that could be causing
this problem......?

[THICK]

I forgot to mention that it says I/O error when I try to boot with
the floppy or the cdrom.................I'm not able to get as far as the new hard drive..........
Thick

[skuz]

When my brother wakes up I'll check on his computer (he has same board as yours) for a settings I may have forgot.

What's your BIOS version ? My bro has 1004 but I remember seeing a version 1005 that "Enhance DDR module compatibility".

To update, you'd have to borrow a different RAM stick though...

This is a guess, it could also be an overheating CPU due to faulty installation of heatsink (you used thermal paste or pad right ?) To confirm or eliminate this, give us the temperature you can see in your BIOS.

You haven't tried overclocking yet I hope ?

[THICK]

I had to work late yesterday but I'm at it again this morning....
I went to the Asus web site and got the latest bios for my board.
(1006)......I'm going to check the things you mentioned and get back to you.......Thanks

[THICK]

Skuz
The CPU temp is 53C/127F ....it was a boxed CPU and I used
the tab that was on the heatsink(no paste)....I haven't tried to overclock .......Also I think flashing the bios is over my head right now.....Do you think the bios is stopping the boot process some how ?....(also the 512 DDR ram is showing installed in the bios)
I tried a new floppy cable-same result .....
Thanks Skuz,
THICK

[travis4prez]

I'm pretty sure I/O errors mean the machine can see the drive but can't read/write to the disk. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Were all these boot disks made on the same machine? If so, then maybe the head is out of alignment and the new drive doesn't see the tracks and thinks the disk is not formatted. Just a shot in the dark but you might want to try to make a boot disk on a different machine to see if that helps.

[Bruneau]

Try a different hard drive cable.

[skuz]

What is really weird is that it gives IO errors no matter which boot device is used.

Temps are acceptable, pad is ok, no overclock.

Alright, try unplugging all your IDE cables, leave only the floppy connected and try to boot from the floppy. Of course, set your bios so that it won't seek any HD or CD and post the result back here.