I'll try to make as much sense as I can, given my general ignorance of
PC and Windows architecture.
Last weekend, I replaced the motherboard on my Zeos Pantera Pentium
100mHz AT tower with a DFI k6bv3 Rev. A+, AMD k6-3 400mHz with fan, and
a stick of micron 64meg pc100 sdram. When I booted up to Windows 95, it
said I had new hardware, and attempted to install it. On my board, I
have an ISA Stealth 64 video cad, an ISA soundblaster 16 audio card (I
think), and the PCI scsi card that had been factory installed
previously on the Zeos board.
After Windows had "found" all of the appropriate drivers and restarted,
it would not boot into Windows, but gave me a "Windows protection
error". I booted in Safe mode, but my Miocrosoft serial mouse would not
work (it could not be detected). I checked the internal COM1
connection, and it seemed to be oriented in the same direction as the
COM2-connected serial port, which ran my modem (and which now seemed to
function OK). My SCSI card was no longer being read by the system
(because of safe mode?), and I couldn't run the CDROM (also from safe
mode?).
I reinstalled Windows 95 to see if that would do it, but no luck.
I used the "restore the registry" procedure that is in the Windows 95
manual (attrib -h -r -s etc., then copy system.da0 system.dat etc.).
Neither of these did the trick.
I wondered if I could reconfigure the CMOS to make it work, so I
restarted and entered it, and set it to fail-safe mode. This seemed to
work, in that it booted up Windows. But the mouse still wouldn't work.
By this time, I was getting quite worn out, so my memories are fuzzy,
but I think I tried to install various drivers for the mouse, with no
success. The CDROM (Mitsumi x4) wouldn't show up, so I used the
included driver disk, which seemed to work. Then, windows wouldn't boot
again except in safe mode. I did it step-by-step, and it failed at the
stage of installing drivers.
Since the cards are legacy cards, could it be some kind of PnP issue?
I know it was disabled on the Zeos. I tried to manually set the IRQ's,
but I didn't know which ones to assign, and the only choice the CMOS
gave me was to either leave a selected IRQ as "PnP" or "legacy ISA".
How does it know which board I'm talking about?
To make a long story longer:
I reinstalled the old board, which got the mouse to work and windows
to boot, but now the registry seems totally corrupted and lots of
essential applications not running. I get errors like "Error loading
DLL-->SCSIDLL.DLL". In the Hardware profile, the mouse and the two HD
controllers (I have two 1.5 Gig HD's) have exclamation marks next to
them indicating they aren't working, but they are the few things that
seem to be allright!
OK gods of tech, please help me. What should I do? I am thinking of
upgrading to Win 98, but will that help? How should I install the new
board without causing Windows to go FUBAR? Is it too late? Should I get
a full edition of Windows 98 SE and completely replace Windows 95, and
therefore reinstall every app on my two disks?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGh!
----------------------
Benjamin Hawes
[log in to unmask]
Boston College
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