Thanks Mobo and MicroBell for your replies. Looks like I have to reformat and start over. The boot disks from the site you suggested, Mobo, are either the emergency 4 disk for Win2K or there is a BIOS boot disk, but only for Win98, doesn't work for me, probably because of NTFS. The LiveUpdate program also doesn't want to work, apparently because it needs the AWDFLASH program to be installed prior to the operating system, which I admit I failed to do. Hey, I've built 4 other machines, never heard of such a step, and have done 2 other successful BIOS upgrades. I've had a lot of trouble understanding the instructions from ASUS, would be better off if I knew Chinese. At least the site you sent me to, MicroBell, had a clear explanation of how it is supposed to work, and I've bookmarked the page. There seem to be many many people in this forum alone who have had trouble setting up this mobo, which Tom's Hardware recently called Motherboard of the Year, lol.
My problem is with installing apps or loading files over 8 megs I get errors up the wazoo. ASUS now says this is because of drives that now have 8 megs of cache, that they weren't available prior to release of mobo. But that is bs, those drives are not that new, my mobo is Rev2.0, bought in August, it never should have been shipped with this faulty BIOS. So everything I've installed over 8 megs has problems, including Windows. I'm SOL. If anyone has any other ideas before I reformat, I'm waiting til I have a whole day, maybe this weekend. Thanks...
TT