Old mobo locks up intermittently and/or reboots on shutdown

Please help!

I posted this last week to a coupla dozen newsgroups, but never saw
my original
message pop up, so I'm trying again.


I have an ASUS P5A-B mobo with the latest BIOS installed (1105).
It has an AMD-K6-2/500AFX processor. All mobo jumpers are correct for
this CPU.
It's maxed on memory (768Mb).
I put in an old WD 20Gb HD & installed Win98SE.

It intermittently locks up (must power cycle to clear).
When I shutdown, it either:
1) hangs at "Windows 98 is shutting down" screen; or
2) reboots.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bill Barker

The intermittent lock-up of your system could have any of a number of
causes, maybe even multiple causes. When multiple, old, and/or scavenged
components are combined, troubleshooting can be very difficult.
Troubleshooting is best started by eliminating components that are known to
be good as problem sources. Your system as described has a lot of possible
weak links.

What you need is a proceedure, because there is no magic answer.

You haven't supplied much information about the circumstances of the
lock-ups.

Perhaps the CPU is running too hot, perhaps the hard drive is failing,
perhaps the operating system has become corrupt, perhaps other peripherals
are at fault.

The best approach is to swap out components between your problem system and
a working system. That should be fairly easy forthe hard drive, somewhat
more difficult for the memory, and even more difficult for the CPU. You
should also used diagnostic programs to test the CPU, memory and, hard
drive.



--
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom
For communication,
replace "at" with the 'at sign'
replace "mindjump" with "mindspring."
replace "dot" with "."

"Bill Barker" wrote in message
...
Please help!

I posted this last week to a coupla dozen newsgroups, but never saw
my original
message pop up, so I'm trying again.


I have an ASUS P5A-B mobo with the latest BIOS installed (1105).
It has an AMD-K6-2/500AFX processor. All mobo jumpers are correct for
this CPU.
It's maxed on memory (768Mb).
I put in an old WD 20Gb HD & installed Win98SE.

It intermittently locks up (must power cycle to clear).
When I shutdown, it either:
1) hangs at "Windows 98 is shutting down" screen; or
2) reboots.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bill Barker

In my case a WD 80 gig HD, started to freeze or force a reboot of
the sytem. After checking it for loose connections I noticed that the
HD was very hot to the touch (circuit board underneath). I put in a
spare HD and the problem went away . Needless to say the HD was RMA'd
and a replacement recieved from WD winthin 2 weeks.

I found the problem easily enough as the system was workng flawlessly
prior to adding the HD (3rd one).

Locust

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 16:08:04 -0600, Bill Barker
wrote:

Please help!

I posted this last week to a coupla dozen newsgroups, but never saw
my original
message pop up, so I'm trying again.


I have an ASUS P5A-B mobo with the latest BIOS installed (1105).
It has an AMD-K6-2/500AFX processor. All mobo jumpers are correct for
this CPU.
It's maxed on memory (768Mb).
I put in an old WD 20Gb HD & installed Win98SE.

It intermittently locks up (must power cycle to clear).
When I shutdown, it either:
1) hangs at "Windows 98 is shutting down" screen; or
2) reboots.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bill Barker

It's maxed on memory (768Mb).

I vote for RAM problem as multiple modules often causes trouble. Run
Memtest86.

Sounds like the classic WIN98 shutdown problem. Search the Microsoft site
for relevant docs. WIN98 is fussy with more than 512MB RAM, have you set
MaxFileCache=262144 in VCache in the system.ini?

Dave

"Bill Barker" wrote in message
...
Please help!

I posted this last week to a coupla dozen newsgroups, but never saw
my original
message pop up, so I'm trying again.


I have an ASUS P5A-B mobo with the latest BIOS installed (1105).
It has an AMD-K6-2/500AFX processor. All mobo jumpers are correct for
this CPU.
It's maxed on memory (768Mb).
I put in an old WD 20Gb HD & installed Win98SE.

It intermittently locks up (must power cycle to clear).
When I shutdown, it either:
1) hangs at "Windows 98 is shutting down" screen; or
2) reboots.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bill Barker