dmoldovan

After re-reading the entire post, something just popped into my mind:
It could be the BIOS itself. You just might need to re-flash the BIOS.
The fact that the PC does check the floppy if inserted at boot time, points me to that direction.
There are several ways to flash the BIOS in such cases, depending on the BIOS manufacturer.

If you had an AWARD BIOS, the procedure is pretty simple:
1. identify the BIOS image on the PC manufacturer's site
2. make a system floppy disk
3. find the flasher utility for the BIOS
4. edit or create the file a:\autoexec.bat to contain a line like this:
flash_program /[switches] bios_image

the switches are different from a flashing program to another, BUT, what you should try to accomplish is that:
make the utility to auto-answer "YES" to any questions it might ask the user. That is because in these situations, you don't see the screen (it's blank) and you usually cannot use the keyboard.

the switches should be found in the readme.txt that accompanies the flasher program.

Good luck

However, I don't know exactly how to perform the flashing of the BIOS in these circumstances if it is not an AWARD/Phoenix BIOS

PS: if you need further guidance, i'll try to provide it for you

__________________
Regards,

Dan