Ok. I'm having a lot of trouble with this and I would appreciate any help. My friend has an Athlon 1Ghz, with SOYO mb (k7vta-b), 128 mb ram, 20 gb Western Digital hard drive, and ATI Rage 128 Pro. He's had problems with the computer ever since he got it (I built it for him from what the parts he wanted; I had a little trouble, but not too much). The first problem was the hard drive not seeming to function properly. It seemed like it would lose power then all of a sudden spin back up (that's the best way I can describe it.) Well, he had Win 98se on it and it ran fine for a while, but still every once in a while (mainly if you barely touched the case where it moved just very slightly), the hard drive would do that funky thing and he'd have to reboot to get Windows to respond again.

Well, about 2 months ago, the hard drive (which was about 2 months old at the time) decided it didn't want to live anymore, so it basically died. Western Digital replaced it because it was still under warranty.

I got back from vacation and he had put the hard drive in himself (he works with computers too), and he was trying to load 98 back on it. He was having a lot of trouble getting it to work. It would do fine until he got to the part of installation where it would search for plug and play devices, then it would just freeze. He even tried loading Linux on it, and it would still freeze at some point.

He finally gave up and gave it to me to look at. I have tried reinstalling 98 more times than I've ever wanted to. It still would always lock up on the plug and play device search thing. I even tried loading Redhat 7 on it (my friend has Mandrake) and it wouldn't install either.

Somehow, I finally figured out that when it came up with the searching for plug and play devices, that if you kept moving the little window around on the screen with the mouse, that it would work. I don't know why, but it did. Well, I finally got 98 on there, and went to install the upgrade for 98se. It still locks up when it tries to find plug and play devices.

I then had the bright idea to try installing 95. And believe it or not, 95 (B) went on without a problem on the very first try. I then tried installing the se upgrade, and it still froze.

I'm about completely out of ideas besides using it as a large paperweight. I have run Western Digital's Lifeguard drive diagnostic thing and done the tests, and they come back and say the drive is fine. The only other thing I can think of is that it's a mb problem with maybe an ide controller or something. It doesn't do the strange little power down thing anymore, but it does make some funny sounds, just for one or two seconds, sometimes when you turn it on.

I'm sorry this has been such a long description, but I'm completely frustrated at this point. I would appreciate ANY help that could possibly be given.

Thanks up front for any help or ideas or comments or anything that you might be able to give. I really appreciate it. Thanks for everything.