Help please major computer problems

[petoola]

A while back my computer was acting up, I had so much stuff on it I didn't want anymore and decided it was probably best to just wipe everything off my hard drive and start over. So went on the reformat the hard drive only to find out that whatever was causing my computer to mess up before didn’t go away and now it was worse. When I finally got windows 98 back on the computer, it was impossible to stay on the computer for more then 2 minutes before it froze up completely.


After a series of restarts the computer eventually would not load into windows at all. I kept getting error messages when the computer tried to boot into windows. I don’t remember what those messages were now exactly however I have since bought a brand new hard drive and DVD drive and put them in my computer. I correctly set the jumper switches on both and my computer at startup was recognizing them fine. So now I went and loaded up Windows 98 on this computer it will either freeze almost instantly just before reaching the desktop or I get this message:

“Write fault error writing device AUX”

Which then makes me have to shut off my computer.
Keep in mind there is nothing on this hard drive yet except Windows 98

I have the following things in my computer:

800 MHz Athlon CPU
Abit KT7/KT7 Raid Mother board
Geforce 4 MX Video card
Sound Blaster Live sound card
Linksys network card
Standard Dvd drive
Laser mouseboard
3 slot usb hookup expansion card
300 watt power supply
Serial Keyboard

 

[Dre313]

When you installed windows 98 ... did you strip it down to the bones ? unplugged unnecessary peripherals (ie printers, scanners, usb devices etc...) If you did then .. what I suggest you do is.. pull out your pci cards leave the minimun .. format it again.. then reinstall your windows.. after you reinstall put each card in one at a time then install your drivers..

-hope this helped

 

[leonec]

Maybe a heat problem? Are all your fans spinning? If there is a significant amount of dust in the box then blow it out.

 

[tizigman]

Did you go through your BIOS and make everything is set correctly? You may want to update them.

 

[PeterGriff]

The error message you are getting can be caused by certain viruses (eg "MacGyver" see Symantec or Mcaffee for more info).
Other than that it points to a hardware issue and the motherboard and RAM chips would be the prime suspects, both can cause intermittant lock-ups. Try swapping in a compatible RAM chip first as this is the easiest to check out (you could also try a software memory checker that runs from a floppy such as memtest). As the other posts have mentioned, remove all the cards except the video to make fault-finding easier. Try taking the mouse off too for one bootup as a test in case it is faulty.

Peter G

 

[livesfreely]

It could be the memory. The memory checkers such as memtest don't work everytime. So, it would be better to not rely on them. I had a similar problem and ran this kind of sofwares, but it showed that the RAM was fine. When in actuality it wasn't. YOu'd be better off to swap the ram sticks if you have more than one or try a new compatible RAM