I've spent most of the day putting my new machine together. Had it all assembled in four hours and it all seemed to be going really well as I installed Windows XP. But then I installed the latest driver for the Radeon 9700 Pro and booted to a blank screen. Arrrgghh! It's been a frustrating evening since then.
After trying numerous things, I decided I needed to flash my Asus P4P800 Deluxe BIOS up to the latest version (current is v16 but my BIOS is v12) in the hope that will help. At then if I contact a support group I can say the motherboard is uptodate. But to flash the BIOS I have to boot from MS-DOS? Oh oh. I didn't buy a floppy drive figuring that's ancient history! There really ought to be a better way to upgrade the BIOS!
So I ripped out the floppy drive from my old machine. Not working. Ripped another one out from a really old machine. Not working either. Huh? I now suspect I've fried them by putting the power in the wrong way. Ahhhh!
Ok, how about making a boot CD. I managed to do that through nu2. But no, the bios flash utility wants MS-DOS and not something else. How about creating a new boot partition and installing MS-DOS on it. But how to install MS-DOS? I thought I had it on a very old archive CD somewhere around the house but I can't find it. Not even sure I would be able to make the partition bootable. Nope.
So I'm stuck. Gotta go buy a floppy drive tomorrow. We're still stuck depending on 20 year old technology.