Neo2 Pt: PS, RAM or HD... opinion needed...

Is the K8N Neo2/Winchester combo THAT much more power hungry than my previous rigs? (See sig.)

I'm having problem as well: basically got thru the install of XP with no problem but since then it has NOT been stable at all! Basically a lot of random reboot and I noticed it mostly happened during HD access!

First off I have to confess: I read from MSI website that the board is NO good for Win98 when SATA HD is used but I tried it anyway and it "SEEMED" to work:

I booted off w/ W98SE CD and FDISK ONLY 15G, which is the partition I intended for the W98SE OS and apps...

I then proceeded to setup XP XP2, partitioned another 45G, which I intended for the XP OS and apps...

Now I purposely boot back into W98SE and formatted the remaining 100G as FAT. (Ok, I remember reading abt. FAT would have trouble recognizing HD larger than 137G but since I ONLY have 100G left for paritition, I 'THOUGHT' I will give it a go...)

I then proceeded to copy my 'data' from my USB HD backup and that's when it started 'rebooting'.

My instinct tells me that's either the power supply or the ram.

Given the relatively light loading of my rig and a very 'good' power supply that has served me well since my tb setup (see my sig.), I would be hard pressed as I didn't think the power consumption of the winchester + K8N is THAT MUCH more than my Northwood setup given everything else is almost the same. Perhaps I'm mistaken???

Sentential mentioned that some BIOS does not bold well w/ dual channel but I'm reasonably sure that 1.30 is good enuf for it. I will try it when I return from my vacation anyway...

Now I'm left with my biggest suspect: that bloody crudge I did to my HD... I'm suspecting that W98SE multi-boot w/ XP PLUS FAT-formatting that 100G of my HD is playing tricks on me... But before I rectify that I thought I would check with you experts here. As you can see, rectifying THIS is rather time-consuming...

So here, what do you guys think?

Sounds like you need to do it right over

I would blow it away and start over. It sounds like you may be messing with the Boot sector, as from what you said in your post, it sounds pretty odd. If for some odd reason you still require a dos bases OS in there, toss in a ATA drive, then install XP on the SATA. Once you install windows XP on the second drive after 98 on the ATA, it will write the boot.ini to the ATA drive and you should be out of the woodwork. Remember that SATA requires drivers imbedded in the OS, that is why when you install XP you are asked right away for them and again mid install. I wont question your need for Win 98, but I would not waste my time with your SATA shenanigans the way you described. If you know your way around these OS's, you know how to have dual boot but share resourses/apps and that would be ok, if you have two separate drives. Remember that Win9x needs C: if you install as the legacy operating system, and XP doesnt care, but that means WIN 98 "controls" your drive, as it is the main operating system.

Good luck

Tx buddy, that's kind of what I want to hear although it's the long way home...

Will try and keep you posted...

Well, I wiped out my HD and re-install w/ XP SP2 ONLY. Now the whole HD is NTFS formatted. Still very unstable. I moved the SATA from port 1 to port 3 and no help... Tried to install WITH and WITHOUT nVidia IDE driver... A bit lost at this point...

Powersupply, you need a new one. What are your rails in BIOS?

You really need both more amps and watts on that. The Cold booting issue is only a problem with older boards. It appears that the vast majority are now shipping with v1.3 or greater

Hmm, I wudn't rule that out but I remember reading abt. the power consumption of A64 and it wasn't much more than Northwood. As I said before, this PS served my previous Northwood rig with absolute ease, hence my reluctance.

Vcore is undervolting a bit: 1.42V while I specified 1.5V
+3.3V: 3.32-3.36V
+12.0V: 11.97-12.03V
+5.0V: 5.04-5.07V
Battery 2.87V
+5VSB: 5.04-5.07V

Is that what you're referring to?

Problem solved!!!

As it turned out, it was the placement of the RAM. I mistakenly placed the pair of rams on slot 3 & 4 'thinking' that they were 1 & 2. Once I placed them on 1 & 2, then it all went well.

Now the next problem is that I maxed out at 225 x 9 with both sticks installed. I took one stick out and now I'm clocking at 280 x 9 with 1.7 Vcore!!!