honestly this isn't exactly a linux question but I am stumpted...

I working on an older Gateway PC (Atholn 800mhz I think)and though the BIOS detects both CDROMs and floppy drives it will not boot from them. The current OS is WinMEvil and all of the hardware detects fine in that but it won't Read CD's or the floppy drive.

... it won't boot from any CD's or Floppies even if they are the only thing in the boot sequence in BIOS... I can't even flash the BIOS

I tried putting a CDROM as primary master and the same thing... so it's not the Secondary IDE channel...and if it was both I's assume the HDD wouldn't boot either...

Has anyone seen anything like this? Is the hardware just mostly dead?

do you have another cd drive you could swap in?
what happens if you totally remove the hdd?

My wife had a Fujitsu Lifebook C (not too old-it has a 1.13 GHZ PIII-Mobile CPU) notebook that flat out refused to boot any Linux CD/DVD's I made from downloaded ISO images, but would happily boot XP's install and some commercial backup software too. I thought maybe my burns were bad, but they booted fine in the new Compaq notebook we bought to replace it, so I don't think that was the cause. I haven't figured-out the solution yet (I checked and there were no BIOS updates for it - so no luck there), but will post here if I find anything. I think the next thing to try is a commercial Linux distro, just to see if it will do anthing different.

Growlor

don't most gateways have some F key that allows you to choose boot device. i had one that it was F12 i've seen others with F10 you mihgt try those to see if you get a menu to choose your boot device. other than that i'd look into a boot floppy that you can direct the boot at the cd

Does the cd drive work in a different computer ?