booting a barebones system

Hi, I havent done this for a long time and was just wondering if I can do the following: take a barebones system with just a cpu, ram, powersupply, and floppy drive in a case with the power on switch connected to the motherboard and boot the system up to A: drive and get an A:/ prompt just using a floppy disk with the one file "command.com" on it. Of course I need to go into bios and set the first boot disk to floppy. I just kinda want to check out a motherboard before I build up the system around it. thanks.

 

I honestly have not tried doing that, but logically, it should work, as long as you have, say, on board video, and you connect the motherboard power lead from the psu, and the power switch cables, to turn it on.
When you are setting up , the way I understand it, it saves to ram first, so, logically, it would seem possible.
Usually, though, if you have a stick of ram, a motherboard, a psu, and cpu, with heatsink and fan, you would test it by going through post, and into the bios. If it posts, and you get into the bios then you can look at system health, and other bits concerning the motherboard, and if it shows o.k, there is not normally a need to know more, as you then add the rest, one at a time, like hard drive, cd rom/floppy etc:,and check after each addition.
If it does not post with just the stick of ram, cpu/heatsink- without video connected, then you have an inkling that the motherboard is suspect, obviously after checking that the power switch/motherboard power from psu cables are connected properly- the ram is compatable, the cpu fan and the psu fan spins.
Someone else might have tried using a floppy, without a hard drive connected, and might tell you different.

 

Hi and thanks for the input. I was able to locate a dos 6.22 boot disk that has all the files on it including command.com which I guess is good to have if you want to flash your bios to a newer version in the dos mode booting from a floppy.

 

This is called a cold boot, when you start a computer with no drives just cpu/heatsink fan, memory and of course power. System builders use it to test the board to see if they get any error beeps before mounting all the rest of the hardware.