Happy ending... K8N-E Deluxe installed and working 100%

Hi,

I just thought I would pass on what I have learnt over the last 2 weeks.

The trouble I had was amazing, but in new board with existing running HDD's with Win98 SE, had some weird errors message etc etc, put old mobo back in so I could get on-line again.

Asked all around the world for advise on why this didn't work like all the other times I have replaced mobo's.

At the time I came to the conclusion of getting some new HDD's for a clean install.

Ha, that was a laugh, you won't believe what happened...

Booted with CD support, fdisk-ed new 80Gb(HDD) no issues, formatted it no issues, copied all win98 SE setup files to new HDD no issues, booted again without CD support to free memory that setup required, no issues...

Ran the setup "General failure reading DRIVE C:" arggghhh...

Got lastest fdisk from MS with 64Gb > support, did whole process again, no difference.

I looked long and hard at the BIOS, set the 32bit disk access on, whole process again, no difference.

Had a big drink and went to bed...

In the morning had a crasy idea to use the HDD ribbon cables that came with the mobo, I had to re-arrange everything in the tower unit I have because the cables are extremely short, I still can't use the floppy one much too short .

I looked at the cables, humm, they have the same 20 pin connecters at the ends as the ones I had that I know worked just fine.

Anyway re-wired the beasty and..... No strange disk errors, I couldn't believe it.

So I guest what I learnt was no matter if the new mobo supplied cables are too short, re-arrange your components to use them or else you could end up wasting a lot of time trying to figure why it won't work.

Also I now reckon that if I had used the new cables in the first place even my old system would have taken to the new mobo.

Happy ending, I hope this helps ppl that may do what I did.

Regards Mike.