My DELL won't BOOT UP.... : 1185

............................................... I'm sorry, but I have NOT been following this thread so I do not know whether the floppy drive works once the computer is booted. So my suggestions might be out of place. 1- drive is defective (includes cables etc) -test with new drive 2- a friend needed to reset the ESCD on his Dell after floppy appeared dead in BIOS, DOS, and Windows - fine now! 3- have a look here, see if this applies to your situation, remember virus details are know to change:

( it seems a quick test to remove all hard drives from system & see if computer can boot to floppy after power off )

...The viruses use a complex algorithm allowing the virus to stay memory resident after cold reboot and loading from a clean DOS floppy disk. On installation the virus stores the CMOS memory that keeps the information about floppy drives and sets that info to zero (i.e. the virus emulates situation when no floppy drives are installed). On accessing to disks the virus temporary restores the CMOS and then erases these fields again. On any (cold or warm) reboot the system checks the CMOS, does not detect the floppy disks and pbuttes the control to the MBR of hard drive. As a result the virus in the MBR receives the control, installs itself into the memory and then pbuttes the control to the floppy disk loader. As a result the virus stays memory resident after loading from a clean write-protected disk.