How much ram is installed?  Some old Intel chipsets do not like more than 64
meg of ram if the external L2 cache is enabled.  Go into cmos and disable L2
external cache.  If that doesn't work, consider replacing ram.  Dos is 16
bit, as is the beginning of win9x install routine.  When the pc shifts to 32
bit mode it starts using all the ram, and if the ram is suspect, the windows
installer program corrupts the hard disk.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Byron Wolter [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 6:40 PM

I purchased a ECS 5VB motherboard and can't get Windows 95 OR 98 to load.
Usually, half-way through the installation or sometimes to completion, it
loses the partition and the hdd is useless.  Everything works fine if I just
load DOS.  I've tried 3 different hard drives and get the same result.  I
repartition and format each drive, but same result.  It's been 4 weeks since
my last e-mail to the manufacturer, to no avail.

Does anyone have any clues as to what would be causing this?  The mb
auto-detects the hdd(s) correctly.  I even selected BIOS defaults, but no
luck.  It has a 200MMX CPU in it.

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