motherboard upgrade ills

[Stu]

I've just upgraded my old K6-2 450 and Soyo 5EHM motherboard with a shiny new Duron 800 and Gigabyte GA-7ZX rev1.01 board.

On first startup, everything seemed fine and the various motherboard parts were detected by windows.

I then installed the VIA drivers, I think they are V4.25a, but I'll check when I get home!

After doing this, when the computer rebooted it found the south bridge and other stuff, then hung. When I pressed the reset button it started to boot into windows (98SE) and then I got the following messages:-

*Warning: Windows has detected a registry/configuration error.
Choose command prompt only and run SCANREG. (SCANREG can't fix the problem.)

*The following file is missing or corrupted: c:\windows\himem.sys.

*File allocation table bad, drive C.

*Cannot find win.com, unable to continue loading windows.

I have since blanked the machine totally and re-installed windows without the VIA drivers.

When I was copying a file from a backup CD into my documents, it misread the CD (cheap CD-R's!), and locked. My Computer had stopped responding and I clicked End Task. This left me with just my background wallpaper, no icons etc, so I pressed reset button only for it to display all of these errors again on reboot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have run a thorough scandisk on my drive and it reports no bad sectors. I have also run wddiag diagnostic software that came with my HD and it reports no errors. Therefore I have discounted the drive being physically damaged. It is a Western Digital Caviar 10.1GB WDC AC310200R drive.

It is the only HD in the system, set as master with an Artec 40x CD set as its slave. On the second IDE channel I have an Artec CDR/RW 2x2x6 set up as the slave. I have a floppy drive also.

The only other things in the system are 1x64MB Compaq PC100 ECC DIMM and 1x64MB NCP PC100 DIMM. I have a Creative Labs TNT2 M64 32MB AGP2x graphics card, and integrated Creative PCI 128 sound.

I have tried the whole process with only the Compaq DIMM in the system as I heard sometimes mixed memory makes can cause problems. This worked once, but before forking out for more Compaq memory I thought I'd try the process again. That time it died again with the same messages as before.

My system has not run any hotter than a CPU temp. of 49degrees C, and a system temp. in the mid 30's.

I have re-installed Windows about 10 times and this error keeps re-occurring. I don't think it's the VIA drivers as it has crashed this way without them installed even (and no other drivers or software loaded), loading them just seems to be a sure-fire way of replicating the problem early on before installing everything else so that I can see if my changes to the system have cured the problem or not.

Sorry this message is LONG, but I've tried to include everything! Any help is much appreciated.

PS. Motherboard BIOS is 7ZX-B FA, I think there's a more recent one but it does not mention fixing this problem so for the mo. I am holding off upgrading it as knowing my luck, I'll get even more problems!!!!!!!!!

[Platypus]

Lets see, registry corruption, FAT errors, missing files, errors copying from CD. The fact that all the problems relate to I/O on the IDE suggests a fault here.

Faulty IDE cable? Controller fault on new M/board?

Other possibles: Is the power supply up to handling a Duron (sounds like it's gone into the old case)? At least 300W recommended.

Have you tried only the other DIMM in case the Compaq one has a problem or is incompatible with M/board, set the most conservative BIOS settings.

Hope these ideas may help.

[Tony Vallester]

try this, im agree whit my friend about the ide cables, so boot from floppy try the start up whit cdrom support, the make a directory named win9x in c:
then copy from cdrom al the cabs from the windows cd, it also in the win9x dir.
then reboot the comp whitout the cdrom and cdr/rw. just whit the hdd, enter the win9x dir and type install, and let it be.

[clauded]

your cdrw should be set as master on second ide if it is the only drive on it,but if i was you i would put the hdd alone master on first ide cdr mas teron the second ide with the cdrw as slave,my two cents, clauded

[LucasR]

i have seen this exact same problem before
we switched the motherboard and had ZERO problems after that !

[format c:]

Installed a Gigabyte board for my Dad and he got illegal operations all over the place, I even did a clean install of Windows.Lost a lot of sleep with that Gigabyte board
Exchanged it a week later for the Asus cuslc-2 board and have not had a problem since, I even got one for my system after I shorted my p3v4x ( tried shorting the power switch pins with a screw driver ooops !!! , bought an atx power switch for bench testing )
I would also make sure your power supply is at least 300 watts since those AMDs love power

[Stu]

Cheers for all the help, I'm amazed at how quick the replies have been (I'm new to forums, only signed up yesterday).

I have tried my system with a maxtor 540MB hard disk and tried installing as before without changing any other stuff, and it worked! I tried it all over again to make sure itn wasn't a one-off, and it worked again!

I therefore think that the hard drive is bust (seems unlikely as scandisk thorough and wddiag found no physical errors), or there is an incompatibility with this particular hard disk - is this possible?

Trouble is, this now gives me a dilemma, do I send the motherboard back to Dabs (had for 3 days) and get a different model, or do I replace the hard drive? If I replace the hard drive I'd like a 20GB - are there any which are known to be compatible with this board or do I have to do the whole trial and error thing again?

Thanks for the help

[Knucklehead]

You might check for an ETD (Electronically Transmitted Disease). I had a similar problem with a virus which replaced a small section of the boot sector with a FAT16 8 meg partition which prevented booting into FAT 32 and gave similar error messages. It spread to my 98 boot disk, my Maxtor & WD disks and back to the harddrive like wildfire (I had eight infected disks). Run antivirus scan on your boot disk, it's worth a try. The only way I could access the harddrive was as secondary on another machine and the virus then showed up in My Computer as a D-drive with 0 meg under properties.

[Stu]

Thanks for all the help guys, I now appear to have solved the problem, but I don't know how! I have:-

*Changed UDMA66 cable going to HD with UDMA33 one (it's a 33 drive so it doesn't matter).
*Changed my CDROM from slave on the the HD cable to master of the the second channel with the CDR/RW as its slave.
*Deleted the drive using fdisk and re-creating it (instead of just formatting it).
*Cleared the Master Boot Record using fdisk /MBR a couple of times.
*Formatted the drive after this.
*Installed Win 98 instead of Win 98SE.

Thanks again for the the help.