How do I work around old Bio's?

I'm not completely clear on what "boot" disk you are referring to. Are they CD's or floppies?
There have been many complaints about XP writing boot floppies that machines could not actually boot from. That's why I stick with CD's whenever possible.

Any board made in the last four or five years should be able to boot from a CD.
Make sure the CD drive is a Master drive on its IDE channel (typically Secondary IDE Channel). Some boards will only do a CD boot from the IDE Master drive.
If this is a 'written' CD, the writing should be done in DAO mode for best results.
If you get the computer to boot from the XP CD, select to Install or Setup XP (can't remember what they call it right now :) ). That's the only way to get to the menu to do a "Repair" of a current installation.

To flash the bios, you can use a Dos Boot floppy (preferrably one created with a Windows 98 machine) to boot the computer to a command prompt. Put the bios flash utility and bios files from ASUS on floppies to flash the bios.

Well answer 1 is XP Home doesn't have those options so you are unable to set Group Policies and there is a upper limit of 5 concurrent connections available.

Now to the second part of your question for some reason the unit is not looking for the CD ROM to boot from the most likely cause of this is that there is one 1 IDE channel in use or available and the HDD is set to Master on this channel and the CD ROM set to Slave so the BIOS isn't even considering the CD a viable option to boot from and with a loaded HDD it never will.

You have a couple of options here the first is to open the case see what is available and if there is a second IDE cable or socket fit a IDE cable to it and then reset the CD ROM to Master on that Lead. However if this is a Desktop case then most likely it will only have the 1 IDE channel available and your only real option then is to remove the HDD fit it to a different computer and either run FDISK and delete the partitions or wipe it with a utility that writes 0's to every sector, the latter is the best option. Then refit the drive to the computer put the XP Pro CD in it and boot the computer without a formated HDD it will then look at the CD ROM and should start to load from there. If you had a "Upgrade" version of XP you should be able to run that from inside XP Home and upgrade the system to Pro but if your trying to do it with a Pro CD you'll have to remove the partition/s first.

Col ]:)

perhaps check to see if bios level boot sector virus protection is enabled. disable it to install/upgrade the os...
change the bios settings to configure the floppy drive as the first boot device. place the floppy you created in the drive and start the machine. what is your exact error or situation at this point? it is possible you may need to confirm the floppy drive works. if the diskette boots ok in another pc, you may need to replace the floppy drive on this one.

humm, this is tricky.

What you need is a W9X boot disk with fdisk utility on it [assuming you have a floppy disk in the monster there]. Boot to the floppy and run the fdisk utility. If you only have 1 partition and you don't have any stuff on the drive you want, delete the partition then create a new DOS partition and make it active. before you reboot stick the XP Pro disk in the CD ROM drive. Reboot however you get into the Asus BIOS e.g. press delete key got in and check to make sure your boot order is boot floppy, CD Rom, HDD-0. Save and boot up to the XP CD. Note: watch the screen during start up because once after POST, you'll be asked to press any key to boot to the CD. IF you don't, the BIOS will look for a bootable HDD which there isn't on.