Freeze during windows install

[Fryguy8]

So my cousin built some ghetto machine a while back, and now my aunt and uncle are using it as their daily computer. Anyways, the motherboard died (a bunch of capacitors started leaking and it stopped powering on), and so I replaced it with an Abit NF7-S2. Here are the specs of the machine (don't laugh, this thing is ghetto)

Abit NF7-S2
Duron 1200mhz
256mb DDR
10 GB HD
S3 Virge PCI

So I do the motherboard swap, no problems, computer boots up, and just out of curiosity I try to boot the new motherboard into windows. No luck, so I bust out the install CD and go to reinstall. Reinstall goes along fine, until "Installing Devices" at about 70% of the way through it just freezes. Retry a couple of times with the same result. So I start to diagnose the system.

1. Pull out non-necessary components and boot with board/cpu/ram/vid/hd/cd. It still freezes.

2. Replace video card. Still freezes

3. Boot up a boot cd and scandisk the HD. 0 bad sectors (and it runs fine)

4. 5 passes of memtest86. No problems.

5. Replace cd drive. Still freezes.

Two other important things I've noticed is that it won't boot a knoppix cd either. Last time I tried to boot it it froze at the "detecting partitions" point. I haven't messed around with knoppix yet from that point to see if I could get it to do anything.

The final issue is that the computer doesn't reboot. If the machine ever goes to reboot, it just hangs and won't post. I have to cycle the power. The reset button works fine as long as the computer isn't hung. So if the comp is running, the reset button resets it fine. If the comp has tried to reboot and I'm hung at a no-post no video screen, I need to cycle the power for it to come back on. Nothing else will work.

As you may have noticed, every part has been replaced and/or verified to be known working, so I am at a loss. Do I need to RMA this motheboard?

 

[Ice Czar]

DOS and memtest load into part of the memory and thus cant fully test that part of the memory, if there are two sticks you can swap them round to fuly test each

cable issues
http://www.ata-atapi.com/atact.htm

power

a bad disc a bad CDRW\ROM whatever

Corruption 101

hardware conflicts, driver conflicts

I was just working on a Gateway with a S3 Virge PCI
it didnt want to play well at all and is likely responsible for the corruption of the HDD since the chipset wouldnt let it properly restart, thus it kept getting hard restarted and eventually borked the install (it would shutdown though)

so Im doing a brand new install and the damn thing wont restart, I find a mention of this is some thread, pull the card and presto it suddenly restarts without issue

BIOS settings, like for instance employing the PCI VGA

 

[Fryguy8]

Well, I got the computer to properly install windows. Not quite sure how, but it magically started to work.

The problem with no having to hard-reboot still persists though. This is with an older matrox video card (PCI) that I had laying around. At this point I'm thinking that the Abit board possibly doesn't like PCI video cards? I bet no one has purchased an NF7-S2 and used it with a cheap pci video card. I could pull the AGP card from my comp upstairs and try that, but while I get around to doing that I'm curious if anyone has any other reasoning.

Also, sometimes it DOES reboot ok. When I first got it up and running I would go

Start | shut down | restart

And it would only bork about 1 out of every 10 times or so. Although recently is has been borking a lot.