GA-6ZXC Rev 2.0 Motherboard problem ? Need help with ideas...

Hi all,

I am having a potential BIOS issue with my motherboard, but will run through
the full story first.

This PC is a P3-450 MHZ machine that I am trying to get back up and running.
It was working with Win2K on it, but has been sitting idle for 6 months.
When I fired it up again, I found that the keyboard would stop responding
when the boot up process of Win2K hit the colour screen (from the mono
screen with the white progress bar running across the bottom).

I have confirmed that the 2 keyboards I tried worked fine in DOS, as well as
in other computers (i am using one of them now).

Once in Win2K, Device Manager failed to show any keyboards installed.
Control Panel also showed no keyboards installed and could not find any when
searching for them.

After playing around with that for a while, and concluding that a reinstall
wasn't a bad idea anyway, I reinstalled Win2K using the standard Win2K
Install CD which I have confirmed is still OK. When I got to the first
question which asks me do I want to REPAIR or INSTALL Windows, I found that
my keyboard once again wouldn't work.

This eliminated Windows from being the culprate, unless as Setup runs
completely off the CD and RAM up to this point.

From there I concluded that it must be a hardware issue and starting looking
into the BIOS. I downloaded the latest BIOS for my motherboard and
installed that.

Running Setup again, I found that the system was now becoming rather
unsatble, crashing out of the Setup process or rebooting and then being
unable to find the operating system.

The details thus far a

Motherboard: GA-6ZXC REV 2.0 (read off motherboard)
BIOS version 201C4A00 (read off screen during bootup)

The rest of the details at bootup are
Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG
Intel 440BX/ZX AGPSet BIOS for 6ZXC v.F2
PIII CPU @ 450 MHZ
CPU ID 0672 Patch ID: 0010
Award PnP BIOS Extension v1.0a

2/5/01 - I44OZX-8671-2A69KG0GC-00

I ran Belarc on it before wiping it and the relevant data is he

Operating System
Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 (build 2195)

System Model
No details available

Processor
450 megahertz Intel Pentium III
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Main Circuit Board
Board: Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. i440ZX-8671
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 4.51 PG 07/01/99

Drives
13.00 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
2.52 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
CyberDrv CW099D CD-R/RW [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Memory Modules
Slot '0' has 128 MB
Slot '1' has 128 MB
Slot '2' is Empty


At the moment I am unable to install Windows 2000 on it fromt he CD and any
floppy disks I install the PC seems to corrupt, because they can only be
used once. I am starting to think there is some sort of corruption of the
BIOS or is it possible I could have some sort of virus on the BIOS???

I am at my wits end in trying to resolve this as the only working solution I
can come up with is to start using it as a doorstop!!!

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Mick

I'd also like to add, that the website manual for this motherboard doesn't
have the pages that I need for BIOS isntructions. I downloaded it from he

http://europe.giga-byte.com/FileList..._ga-6zxc_e.pdf

The BIOS that I used to update this was obtained from he

http://europe.giga-byte.com/FileList...ga-6zxc_f2.exe
For this one, I had to edit the autoexec.bat file to point to the correct
executable.

I have now fdisk the harddrive, and ran setup again.

I got to the blue setup screen and soon afterwards (ie, before I am asked to
do anything) I get this error:

Error file: \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 4. Set
up could continue. Press any key to exit.

It seems that this could be a memory or overclocking issue according to
Google (http://tinyurl.com/h68w9) I will play around with memory and see
if that resolves it. Haven't overclocked the motherboard, and don't even
know where to start so will leave that one for now...

TIA

Mick