System: Abit BE6 r 2 m/b; Win98; 128mb.dram;celeron 486 (not overclocked); Maxtor h./d x2 (8Gb and 10Gb); Matrox G220 video card; 3com nic;adaptec scsi card; Hauppage wintv card;winmodem and soundblaster 64 sound card

I swapped out my Abit BH6 motherboard and replaced it with an Abit BE6 r II earlier this week. I set the bios with its default settings but changed the setup to recognise two hard drives and two floppy drives. I attempted to boot up but everything stopped with the message "Write fault error writing device AUX. Abort, retry, ignore, fail" When I tried any of the options they simply repeated down the screen. I aborted and tried again but once more with the same result.

I then decided to reinstall Win 98. This went well until the system attempted to load all plug and play devices. At this point everything froze up. After numerous retries with the same result I removed all cards except the vga card and retried but still without success. I then hooked up another hard drive that I had, formatted it and loaded Win 98. This went through without a hitch and I was able to boot up and run Windows. I concluded from this, rightly or wrongly, that I did not have a hard ware problem so I tried my original setup with my two hard drives but still without success.

At this moment I am stuck and am trying to avoid the prospect of a reformat. I do have a full backup although it is about a month old so all is not lost but I am hoping to avoid losing all my settings and my most recent mail messages.

Can anyone suggest the way forward? I think I have reached the end of my limited knowledge base and need to turn to the experts. Help!!

Gerry
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