ANYONE!! I have been trying to do a fresh install of win xp for 3 days. Finally troubleshooted the prob to the mb. When I called there tech support they said I need to update the bios.. That's great except:
1-I have no OS on the machine.
2-I have a laptop to download the bios updates from, but I do not have a floppy drive in my laptop.

I searched creating a bootable cd.. follwed the directions. Now I have a more problems. I unzipped the bios files and added them to the cd I made for the boot cd. When I insert this cd, I get a NON_SYSTEM DISK ERROR
I created a cd, with only the boot. It boots with A:/, I created another cd with the bios files, I put the other cd in typed in dir, and none of the files for the bios come up, I get kernel and some other junk. I was able to copy the cd with only the boot disk to the floppy on the machine, but can't copy the the cd that has the boot disk and the bios files.
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT I'M DOING WRONG????HELP PLEASE

I should mention, the problem I was having originally was that I could not install xp... it will not install.

Do you have any other OS you can temporarily install on the desktop?

An old version of Win98 or something might work and then you could download the BIOS files, update, and then install XP.

Even an old version of DOS might work. Install it on the machine, copy the BIOS files to a CD from you laptop, copy them to desktop, make disk.

I finally was able to boot... it said that I updated my bios... but I am still unable to install windows xp or win. 98 for that matter... man this sucks

Are you using a regular xp install disk, or is it an upgrade, or recovery disk?

If you are really sure your motherboard is the culprit and BIOS-flashing doesn't do the trick you will need another motherboard.
But I have to ask, did you check the IDE cables? From your other thread it sounded like you had this problem with two different mobos and it's hard to believe that you have bad luck like this...unless something else is frying them, like the PSU. But why all of a sudden, doesn't make too much sense.

I have a reg.. xp install disk.. actually I have 3.. all three give me errors on install.