Hello all..

I just fixed a friends PC with a new PC Chips M848A MOBO, his old MOBO was more-or-less dead and the Power supply plug was showing signs of overheating Pins, so replaced that with a 350 PSU ( a working spare)

I got it booted up and after removing and reinstalling system drivers (in safe mode) got it to run Windows XP.

BUT... He took it home and wanted to dual-boot, so tried installing XP onto the other drive, but when booting the XP CD from the BIOS, or running XP from his working XP, the Installation hangs on "Checking your Hardware Configuration" or whatever.. just gives a black screen. That XP CD boots fine on my PC, or any other he tries it on.

So he phoned me and I advised all the usual things like resetting bios etc. but nothing seems to help. I saw a forum (elsewhere) where the same problem was present with a very similar setup as his i.e. PC Chips M848A MOBO, AMI BIOS, Athlon 2600+, 512 MB RAM, NVidia Geforce 5200 256 MB RAM, 2xIDE 80 Gig HDD, DVD RW, DVD Rom/CDRW but none of the suggestions (mostly things I had him try anyway) didn't help.

I'm going to his house in the morning armed with a bios upgrade, but I'd like to know if there is a definitive fix for this issue, as I suspect the bios upgrade may not help. I know about the 166 FSB issue with some of these boards but he tried different settings to no avail.

I'd be grateful for any help.

Cheers

I got an e-mail from Arjan as below

Hello,

Is it right that this topic is yours?
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread38075.html
So yes, Have you already fixed the problem because i've got the same problem
and can't figure it out.

Thanks for now,

Arjan

Yes Arjan I did fix it, turned out to be a simple fix, but not sure if it will work for you.

The problem was that there were 2 Hard Disks, the jumper on one was set to Cable-Select and the other to Master, once the Jumpers were set correctly to Master and Slave the problem went away.

Looks like this is a Windows Installer bug, as it should have given a useful error message (Such as "unable to detect the drive") instead of just hanging on the Install. Not sure if this issue is unique to this MOBO/BIOS but there does seem to be similar reported issues with it.

hope this helps

Cheers

Dave

> > hi, writing from exil
> >
> > right now im trying to upgrade my m848a AMD bios.
> > is quite risky stuff, because i could delete the firmware with the
> > downloaded files
> >
> > can only hope the bootdisk i made and the files for update the bios
> > hardware are all right.
> >
> > i wish i had not to do this, but whenever i start my pc it doesnt send
> > information to video, i only get a screen if i keep pressing the on
> > button while plugin in the power caple. simply on/off or reset button
> > wont let graphic appear.
> >
> > or it get stuck at:
> >
> > ram check / fdc faillure
> > windows startup (when graphical interface is about to load)
> > or i get bluescreen with message pc locked to evade damage (acpi out
> > date) i should go to www.hardware-upgrade.com

what makes you think a bios update will fix this problem,

I had a similar situation. I have an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512 MB PC2100 ram, ATI Radeon 7500 2 IDE HDs (40 GB and 300 GB) and 2 DVD players from an old PC and installed them in a PC Chips M848A motherboard. I tried installing Windows XP Home Edition and it would stop at the Checking Hardware screen and hang. I left it for hours and it would do nothing. I eventually came across a fix, at least for me. In the BIOS, in the Peripheral Setup section, I set the 'USB Ports Supports' option to Disabled. There are 2 other USB type options, you may want to disable all 3. After that I was able to install Windows. However, the USB ports were disabled. After installing XP SP2 I set 'USB Ports Supports' to Enabled and was able to use the USB ports. Not sure when the best time to enable the option was, this jut worked for me.

Hope this helps!

davep