At 07:31 PM 07/24/2000 Brendhan Horne wrote:
>Ok things are getting really bad now...
>...I had some other RAM chips I tried each one
>individually. I still get windows locking up....


Brendhan:

Best bet is to strip the system down to the essentials... the motherboard
in the case, the CPU, one DIMM, floppy, hard drive, and video card (use
only known-working components). Verify you have no shorts or inadvertent
grounds between the motherboard and the case. Check the power supply. Do
all the plastic standoffs and/or screws and posts look okay? Check all the
case cable connections (the wires from the LEDs, reset, power, speakers,
etc.) and remove any questionable connections. Check the motherboard
settings for the voltage, multiplier, bus frequency, CMOS, etc. Reseat the
video card. Check the IDE and floppy data cables. Is the hard drive set as
a Solo/Master? All the power connectors snug?

Do a thorough motherboard manual check. Make sure your construction and the
physically configurable setup is congruent with all the pages in the manual.

Power up and go into CMOS. Select and accept the default BIOS settings.
Auto-detect the hard drive. In Plug and Play, select PnP aware OS.

Reboot to a Windows 98se Startup disk. Run a program like WIPE.COM to zero
out all sectors on your boot drive. This will
eliminate all artifacts on the drive. You can get this utility from IBM at:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm

FDISK and format your hard drive.  Run SCANDISK C: and do a surface
analysis. Then, turn off your system.  Add a known-working CDROM to the
secondary IDE channel, by itself, set as a Master IDE device. Connect the
IDE and power cables.

Reboot to a Windows 98se Startup disk. Copy all the files from the Windows
98se CDROM's \WIN98 subdirectory to a newly created C:\WIN98 subdirectory.
Change to the C:\WIN98 and run SETUP.

Go through the Windows installation from scratch. Don't ever use a bootable
hard drive with Windows 9x as a quick and dirty way to get Windows running
on a new motherboard. It's not quick but it's very dirty. The Windows
installation will always have artifacts, bloated and corrupted files, and
inaccurate registry and system entries that will frustrate you to no end.
Always start a Windows installation with a virgin drive.

Add, detect and install drivers for each additional device, one piece at a
time. If you are using any legacy devices, you may have to manually set
aside system resources in CMOS and in Windows.

Once everything is working you can try to optimize CMOS and Windows settings.

You want to start with the basics and work up from that frame of reference,
one step at a time. This will help isolate problems. When problem solving
try one solution at a time and if it doesn't work, change things back
before trying the next solution. This is an inelegant, brute-force method
of problem solving, but it usually uncovers those silly little inattentions
which cause the fault.

Let us know where you experience the first hang up and detail the problem.
We'll go from there. Good luck.

Regards,

John Chin

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                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>