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off the cuff, bad floppy or floppy drive

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Bad floppy is pretty likely.
Check the floppy on a working computer. Righ click on the A: drive icon in explorer, click properties, click the "tools" tab, click "check now" and check the box to scan for and attemp recovery of bad sectors. Or open a command propmpt or dos prompt and run chkdsk A:. If either reports bad sectors, throw the floppy in the trash and try again with a new floppy.

Also, make sure that booting from the CD is enabled in the BIOS. If booting from a CD isn't an option, this computer is probably too old to be worth wcrewing around with.