well as far as the disks........I have 2 HP reinstall disks.....and 1 windows 98se factory disk.......none will boot. I've tried 2 windows boot floppys one has dos 5.0 on it the other 6. neither will boot.
I agree that it looks like a bios problem but the bios looks good/...reconizes both hard drives and both cd drives as well as the floppy drive. I hadn't thought of looking at the cables, I dont have a clue how they night be bad or loose.......but I'll open her up and have a look.......