FIC motherboard problems

[MetalgodZ]

I recently bought an FIC AU13 motherboard (after cracking the g/f's KR7A-RAID....NOT a good thing...)

I'm running:

FIC AU13 board
512MB PC2100 DDR
MadDog Geforce FX 5200 Plus 128mb
Lite-on DVD burner
Lite-on CDRW
onboard sound, LAN, everything else

The issue I'm having is that I can't install anything at all in the system.

I first tried to clean install WinXP Pro with an 80gb Seagate HDD. Created a new partition, formatted it, and crashed immediately after formatting. Gave me a blue-screen error which I don't have, but can reproduce if necessary.

Rebooted, tried again. Same results, same error. Rebooted, tried installing Win2K Pro. Deleted partition, created new, formatted, hit 99% and got an error that the drive was bad.

Removed the drive, installed a Western Digital 40gb drive that was known good. Tried installing WinXP again. Same error message. Tried installing 2000 again, bad drive error again.

Now I'm down two drives (neither one works in any other system any more), I'm out about twice what the board should cost, and despite the fact that I needed this running BY FRIDAY, CompUSA won't give me my money back w/o testing the board...And I don't trust that for a second. Anyone got any ideas?

 

[1stITMAN]

well have you tested your memmory try simmtester.com
also use the hard drive utilities from the vendors to the drive.
Never heard of that mobo you should have bought summat reputible such as MSI, ABIT, ASUS and GIGABYTE

Zaheer Ahmed Iqbal
I.T Systems Support Engineer
Bsc. (Hons).

 

[MetalgodZ]

I've known of FIC for a while, and I haven't had any problems with them.

I just noticed something in another post... I'm not sure what FSB the chip is supposed to run at (it's an Athlon XP 1800+) and I get several different answers when I look online. I've found listed fsb speeds of 133, 166, and 266. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which one is correct. The chip auto-detects fine, although I'm not sure if this is causing a problem with my PC2100 RAM.

 

[garebo]

FIC mobos have been around for a long time, they are often found as oem boards for white boxes, similar to ECS and pc chips mobos, the oem part i mean. Boards themselves, i have heard ,are fine.
I am baffled by your prob, wonder if the ram should be tested?

 

[MetalgodZ]

Will test the RAM ASAP (off to class for now...)

Still can't find info on the chip though. I'm finding the same amount of pages saying that the XP 1800 runs at 266 as ones saying it runs at 133....this poses a problem, because I KNOW that the chip is unstable at the wrong speeds for some reason. It the KR7A that I used to run, it would ONLY run at 1800. It wouldn't even POST with the default CMOS reset speed.

 

[micker377]

133 or 266: The CPU FSB is 133. AMD CPU uses the "Double Data Rate" memory to clock at 266. Something about using the "up" slope and "down" slope of each data pulse. Too complicated for me! Just set it at 133. XP(X) above XP2500 is set at 166 to get a 333 DDR. XP1600 and down are set at 100 to get 200 DDR.