fitting a new motherboard

The first thing to do is rename your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files and reboot. Any driver that won't work with your current board, may cause Windows to be confused (highly technical term). If the wrong drivers are there, then Windows doesn't know how to handle them or if they aren't Win98 compatible, you will get that problem. That's the first step.

If you don't have the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files, check the documentation for a proper driver. Since you can't get the CDROM to work, you may have to copy some drivers from another computer to a floppy, assuming, of course they will fit.

The last thing to check is whether a virus has gotten onto the boot sector. I found one and it plagued me for quite awhile and had the same problem. Of all places, I found it on the original, write protected disks of WIN 3.1. Go figure.

If you can boot from the WIN98(se) bootable floppy that has the CDROM drivers and the CDROM works, then it's a problem with the configuration on the harddrive.

Try that.

The easiest way would be to reinstall a copy of WIN95 SR2.5 and the upgrade to WIN98 SE operating system.

1. rename your config.sys and autoexec.bat files, and delete the originals

2. Get into your system bios, and make a few changes. Somewhere in all those settings, is a question PNP OS Yes/No.... change it to yes. For some reason, MB manufacturersship virtually every MB with the default as NO, even though Windows 95 and beyond have become pretty much the default Operating systems.

Ensure PCI control is turned on to Auto, not ISA Legacy.

Hope this helps

Hello Peter,

Sounds like you have a mess on your hands! To clean this mess up, first find out what the manufactures web site says about your motherboard. Many motherboard companies have complete information for set up available to any one in need, plus bios updates. When you get to the website, find out if the mother is jumperless or are jumpers present on your board. Without the proper jumper settings present, your board may work, but with a great deal of error codes, or it may not work at all. Once again, this information is present via the manufaturers website.
As far as the cd rom, are you sure that you have the cables secure? The cables are connected with the hard drive as the last connection if its' a joint use cable? And, is your cmos set to correct drive positions A,B,C, and so on. Lastly, is it possible that you could download your IDE drivers to a 1.44 floppy if all you need are the cd rom drivers.

Knighthawkemage

Thanks to all who helped me, as a side question to this, If I fitted a removeable hard drive rack to both my work P.C. and my home P.C. then tranferred the same drive between the computers would it work taking into account the different motherboards, graphic cards etc in each machine or would it be problems?

regards

Peter

As others have mentioned make sure PNP is active in bios, rename autoexe & config files then reboot into safemode then go control panel/system/device manger and remove all system devices and USB (if installed). Also in if the new mainboard uses VIA chipset, find and install their driver set from safe mode.

Peter, you can do that, but Windows will
change it's configuration each time you move
the drive to the other machine and ask you to
reboot after it changes devices. If you put
in a bootable drive in each computer and have
the program and data files on the removeable,
it will make it easier. I do that with a SCSI
drive to transfer large audio files.

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