Help... Or just tell me my motherboard is not bad...

Ok am on my last straw with this PC.

I have win98 running on my PC and then one fine day I get this parity error, am like what's going on. I trying installing stuff from CD, stuff I dowloaded etc and the system sometimes tells me bad cab file and other times it doesn't.

So, oh well I figure I have a data trasnmission problem, however am still thinking it may be a win98 problem. So, I go ahead and format the drive, put in my newly bought win2K cd and start to install it. Everything goes alright then somewhere during the install I start getting errors saying that this .dll file couldn't be copied, ensure your cd is placed in the drive and try again and this happens for a lot of files. So am like that's not right. So I stoped the instal and formatted again. Decided that myabe there's something wrong with the CD so I installed win98 again. Win98 installs like a charm no problem but after all is said and done when am running windows I get the same errors.

Oh ok.. maybe the system is fine, maybe it's just the IDE cables. So I go ahead and swap out all the IDE cables and for safe ground got a win2k update cd this time. I extracted the files to the hard drive and ran the instal from there. Everything starts up fine then when win2k reaches the file copy point I start getting errors again saying that a .dll file couldn't be copied etc.

Now am totally fustrated and I just don't want to believe that it's the motherboard but if it is I guess it is.

So, tell me what you guys think, you believe that's a motherboard problem or can something else be the problem?

Thanks in advance...

Have you tried switching your RAM out for other stuff? It sounds like it may just be a bad stick. I had the same problem, loading the OS on a cleanly formatted drive and get missing DLL files left and right. I just took my two sticks out and put one good one in that I knew worked and went from there and everything worked fine. Then you just have to test each stick by itself to see if the problem lies there afterwards.

Just s thought...
~AciD

Oh did I forget to mention something...

Yes AciDriveHB I didn't actually tried that but I did had one bad stick in my system. You see my system had 640MB SDRAM and it was reading up as much less so I inserted and placed back each stick to see which one was bad. I even placed them in different slots to ensure that it was the stick that was bad and not the slot. But that was all before I reinstalled the OS.

But as u mention that, I could have a bad stick that's maybe reading up OK worst things have happen so I will swap it out tonight and try the instal again.

Thanks for the heads up...

Yep, sounds like a ram ram problem.

If you not sure about which stick is bad just pull one out of a computer that runs fine and see if that solves the probelm.

Another issue with RAM is bimetallic corrosion. RAM cards have nice gold contacts and some motherboards have steel connectors. Gold being more noble starts to corrode, sometimes reseating the DIMM does it, other times you have to run an eraser (pink pencil type) over the contacts, wipe the rubber off and reseat.

99.999% that this is a RAM problem i was in the same situation that stinck man

Let me guess. AMD? LOL Which motherboard?

Make sure the mother board jumpers are set to the proper clk speed and multiplier for your processor.

Don't depend on the jumperless feature of the motherboard to detect the proper values. Set them manually with the jumpers.

KapperDog my last AMD gave me hells. I couldn't get that chip to stay cool so I stopped messing with AMD.

I am running a Pentium III. I have tried every thing suggested here by the guys with no luck thus yet, so I pretty much believe that the board has gone bad.

I guess, no home PC for another month, that sucks but such is life.

Guidance...