System won't boot from floppys or CD w/o long delay

[Azriel924 0]

I hope someone else has seen this before. I'm stumped. I'm running a P4 3.06ghz cpu on an Asus P4T533 motherboard with 512MB of 32 bit 1066 Rambus. Sytem has a SoundBlaster Audigy2 s/c,2- 120GB Maxtor H/D, integrated NIC, Yamaha CR1 FE CD-RW, DRide DVD 16x, Sony floppy, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP with 128MB . System runs great normally, but hesitates for over 5 minutes whener I try to boot from a floppy or CD. I have the boot order properly set in the BIOS and have even disabled booting from the H/D. My Win98 CD won't boot at all, my DOS boot disk won't run. I have tried NTFSDOS and it works after long delays. The XP Pro CD boots with several long delays but runs properly after. Has anyone any idea what the problem might be? I hace changed out the floppy drive and the boot CD drive but it changes nothing. Help please/ ;(

[mezron 0]

I had the same thing happen once... turned out to be a failing hard drive.

 

Jim

[sapiens74 0]

Pull everything from the system cept the video card and ram, flopppy and hard drive.

 

 

Reset the bios and disbable all onboard items such as sound, and ports.

 

Then try

[Azriel924 0]

I truly appreciate the replies so far. I have tried disabling all onboard ports and extras, I stripped it down to the cpu, ram(tested ram), video card (tried 2 known good) floppy(tried 2), and hard drive........no luck. You may be right Mezron, the reson I was trying to boot from a floppy was to diagnose a questionable hard drive. I will try it w/o a h/d and see what happens. I did disable the hard drive in the BIOS but it was still connected. This beats anything I've ever run across. The system runs fine with my WinXP Pro install on the good drives, I will try to boot from a floppy without the bad drive as well and see if that makes a difference. Thanks for the suggestions, I would still like to hear from anyone with an idea of what may be wrong. I'll keep trying till I beat it or it beats me.