I had been writing a series of letters that where titled "in with the new" which was an effort to help me assemble my new computer. A situation that did not succeed, however the methods by which were used to find the error was most interesting.  And involved a conference between Award (manufacture of the BIOS), Gigabyte (manufacturer of the mother board), and Microsoft(OS manufacturer and the only ones to charge me for their help). With the help of PCBUild I was able to eliminate a lot of possible items but along the way there was a myriad of small problems that combined would be enough to make even the experienced computer builder pull out their hair. So as you read this have a chuckle because there were a lot of colorful metaphors used when I was going through this.

With a basic build set up of MB, CPU, RAM, HDD, video card,and power supply and spare parts on everything but the MB and CPU( and boy was I swapping parts). The initial objective was to test the system by getting it load windows onto the HDD. I would then swap the hard drives from my old computer to the new one this test was frustrating but saved me from losing my working setup.

Knowledge base #1: When loading on a GA-7IX MB, set the BIOS to fail-safe. However don't leave at that alone. You have to go in and tell it to recognize your floppy drive if you are using a boot disk. You must also disable the virus detection this will cause all sorts of errors .

Knowledge base #2: A brand new out of the package floppy drive cord does not mean that it will work. But it also means that it would most likely be the last thing I would suspect and that caused me hours of aggravation. I don't have a floppy cord tester and the thing I ended up doing was swapping with one I had in the old computer.

Knowledge base #3: Award Bios does not manufacture the bios for Gigabyte MB's . I suspect this is true with other companies. I was having SUWIN errors I went to the M$ knowledge base and learned that improper bios settings can be one of the reasons for that error to come up. I had tried different bios settings all the way around. So I called Award ( They don't like doing telephone support and it took me almost 2 hours on hold to get a Tech). After speaking to the tech I learned Award sells the source code to Gigabyte and then Gigabyte customizes it. And they really can't do anything to help me.

Knowledge base #4: Gigabyte Bios f2 version has problems with the External cache reading data They will give you their beta F3 to flash (you have to ask for it). It is beta for a reason. It has problems reading the bus on the MB. It however doesn't seem to fix the read memory problem I had with the memory test reading through four times before stopping. I believe I had a defective Bios from the start but I am not smart enough about computers to be 100% certain. This guess is by process of elimination.

Knowledge base #5: Gigabyte will send you a troubleshooting program if you call them enough. It's a good one and confirmed that everything was OK as far as hardware went, it does not check bios.

Knowledge base #6: Once you have flashed your bios, troubleshot the hardware, it doesn't mean the bios is 100%. I was now getting windows to load copy files to the hard drive go through it's first restart and the point where it goes to create the driver database it would freeze up. I tried different CD's of  Win98se.I would have restart and/or reformat, I did this so many times I was going nuts . A call to Gigabyte recommended that I check with M$ after pouring over countless manuals. I called M$ support this was going to cost me $35. M$ had me copy the CAB files to C: in DOS and after coping the files at the prompt type "setup/p b" without the quotes. They also had me disable internal and external cache something had done before but was reluctant to do again it takes 3 hours for windows to copy the files in the setup to the hard drive. I did what they asked. After the first restart with the setup command that had been given it now will prompt me for each piece of hardware it wants to create a driver for, And the first one is to detect the bus it would ask I would click yes and about half a second later it would freeze. I did this a couple of times with cache on and off and switched in between always got the same thing. Windows could not detect the bus because of a fault in the bios. If you by a MB get a one year warranty from the person you bought it. I bought mine at EBAY with a 90 day warranty and didn't get a chance to install it until after that had passed.

Knowledge base #7: Bios chips from Gigabyte cost $30 plus $9 s&h

Thanks to everyone on the list who helped me with info.  It helped point me in the right direction.

I also give the moderators permission to post this on PCSOFT. I belong to both lists but this problem started in PCBuild and so that is where I will address the conclusion.



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