You are welcome. Glad you are making progress.
But you should be able to use biped with no issues. Place you character mesh so the feet are at 0,0,0.
Scale it to the right size you need.
Place the biped in the same view that your model is facing you.
Turn on figure mode, then you will have to center the biped your self as 3D Max want to place it offset a bit to the right for some reason.
Move the whole biped by clicking on the COM object or the bone called Biped.
Set the pelvis so that the top of the pelvis is at the waste line of your character. When you scale or rotate the biped bones, make sure you are using local for reference coord sytem. You can scale the pelvis so that the thigh bone link is in the middle of the seem where the leg meets the lower abdomin of the body.
Either do the legs first or do the upper body, it is up to you.
Scale the bone so that most of them are within the mesh. Makes it a little easier to weight the verticies after you apply the skin modifier. Make sure that fingers and toes last bone, not the nubs is slightly past the end of the mesh.
Work your way thru the whole skeleton till you size and position all the bones. Make sure the footstep ends up at 0,0,0.
At that point save your file and then save a working copy to apply the skin modifier. You can do a simplified one to practice with with 2 figure and 1 toe, and 3 spines instead of 4.
Try an keep the bones under 63 if you can.
Also you can send the max file to my email address posted under my profile and I can look at your file if you wish.
I have done 12 charaters this month all with bipeds and they are working great in FPSC, so I think we can get you on the right track. bipeds are nicer to work with because all the bones are restricted to the proper rotation making animation easier.
Rigging bones on you own is good, but takes a little longer to make sure the axis of the bones are aligned proper for you.
