Oh my, but this sounds familiar.  I picked up a friends AMD K6-300 the other
day after it crashed.  It was not bootable, so I tried to install Windows
98SE again.  I got a SUWIN error.  So, because I wanted to save the data on
the HD, I tried to XCOPY all the data to a new drive.  The plan was to make
a copy of the contents, format the drive, and rebuild.  Well, lo-and-behold,
I could not even do a complete XCOPY without the system (being booted from a
floppy) telling me about an invalid FAT.  This was just ONE of the miriad of
problems I had.

What did I find out eventually?  Well, the board itself was a combo board
with video and sound on it (it had 8MB of exclusive video RAM, it did not
share video RAM).  After hooking three separate drives up to it that were
fine on other systems, but did not work on this system, I came to the
conclusion that the drive controller was bad.  I also had several problems
just trying to get it to boot from a floppy.  After several hours of
testing, the whole board finally gave out and I couldn't even get it to
post.

I say all that to say this.  Try a new motherboard.  Even if it doesn't have
all the bells and whistles of the current board, it is a good test.  Use as
much of the original components from the bad system to test the new board to
make sure that that is indeed the problem.  Good luck.

From: "Fred E. Caldwell" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 08, 1999 1:50 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Corrupt Cab Files


> I picked up a friends AMD K6-400 the other day after it crashed. It was
not bootable so I decided to fdisk the MBR and the HD. When I tried to
format the HD I got the corrupt cab file set up cannot continue. I tried
this several times befroe I got a new HD out and replaced it. After setting
it up in the cmos and doing the fdisk and format thing,  I found that I got
the same erra with the new HD. I changes the Mem and reseated the processor
but no change .Any Ideals guys and girls..oh yes . I did try several other
start up disk and full install cd's

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