I just built a P4 1.5Ghz boxed processor, with the Intel D845WN motherboard. IDE-1 has a brand new Western Digital 60GB harddrive as master, and a Maxtor 8GB harddrive as slave. IDE-2 has a 52X CD-ROM as master and a QUE CD-RW as slave. The Diskette drive connecter has a TEAC floppy 3 1/2 drive. It also has 512mb RAM, and a Radeon 64mb DDR AGP Video card.

When I power on, everything appears to function correctly. I can enter into the BIOS setup program. I see that all the above drives are recognized by BIOS. My boot sequence is 1-removable, 2-harddrive, 3-CD Rom.

Since I have not yet formatted the master hard drive, or installed any operating system, I am trying to boot up with a boot diskette. I get the following message:
"Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key." Then, after depressing enter, I get:
"Boot Failure: System Halted"

I have tried several system boot diskettes, and verified that they will work in my other two computers. I have even thought the floppy drive may be bad, so have burned the boot diskettes onto several CD's, changed the boot sequence in the setup program, and get the same error message.
I have also tried switching out the ribbon cables, and verified the pin 1 is positioned in the drive correctly.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Your boot sequence should be floppy drive first.

Shelly

Thanks for your response.
The floppy drive is the frist priority in my boot boot sequence. I referred to it as "1-removable", because that is how it is defined in the "Intel Desktop Board Technical Specification - BIOS Setup Program" manual. When in setup, I see the floppy drive listed as my "removable device".

In addition to "Boot Sequence", do you also have a BIOS setup option called "Boot-up floppy seek"? If so, try enabling it.

Also, try disabling "Quick Boot" or "Fast Boot", or if it's called "Boot-up Speed" with a Fast or Slow option, try Slow. After the install, you can change it back.