gummy 0 Newbie Poster

Hi to everyone.. :)

I'm running a ep-8kha+ with athlon 1700.
first start seems to boot fine...but nearly everytime I restart , the system hangs for upto a minute or more. it just stops after shutting down , blank screen on monitor and the debug led display on mother board reads " FF "..

I have done the following tests so far..
: tried a new master Ultra ATA cable ( no difference )
: Tested harddrive in another stable system ( worked fine )
: Tested a different harddrive in the system ( same problem existed )
: Unplugged all CDroms, cards, etc ( no affect )
: Voltage on healthy pc was 12.48v on problem PC its varied between 11.61v to 11.79v..

at the moment I only have video card , floppy drive, and hard drive connected.. and keyboard , mouse , monitor of course.
so its looking like its a problem with mother board or cpu or power supply.

Any suggestions on which chips on mother board may be screwed or any form of test I could do, whether its a software test device or a hands on manual test of circuits.. would be greatly appreciated..

If you need any more info just let me know...

Thanks heaps for your support ;)
Gummy...