ahh, well i just opened the thing up again. in the bios (before i opened it up), i noticed that i had the HD plugged into the secondary ide and the cdrom into the primary. maybe that had something to do with it? so, anyway, i opened the sucker up. i switched the ide for the hd and cdrom, then i unplugged the floppy and hooked it back up. now everything works fine. what did u mean by floppy cables reversed?