5ali61 motherboard problems

[hoochieman]

I'm using the 5ALI61 along with an AMD K6-2-400Mhz processor.
The system boots up to the windows splash screen but
will not go any further. Everything seems fine up to
that point. It ran through initial Win98 setup well,
but would not complete initial restart. My
guesses at the culprit are the following:

1. I have 32mb of FPM memory. If I set the bus speed
to 100Mhz and multiplier 4 to set the cpu clock, I
know this is too fast for FPM simms (though I did try
this combo just for the heck of it) . I tried to set
the bus speed to 66 and 60 Mhz with the multiplier at
5.5 (the max it could be set, which of course was
underclocking the cpu to 360 and 330, respectively)
but that didn't work either. The farthest I've made it
is when I chose "safe-mode" and made it into Windows,
though everthing was extremely slow.

2. It could also be a hard disk compatibility issue.
I'm using an old 540mb Western Digital drive as C:
(primary master) and a 350mb Maxtor drive as D:
(secondary master). Would these old drives cause this
sort of hang up?

No matter what I do, the system will not boot past the
win98 splash screen, sometimes the splash screen does
disappear and I see the stuff that the bios had
written to the screen prior to the splash, but it
never goes any further.

 

[hoochieman]

In response to my own problem, since no one was jumping to help, and after hours of searching and beating my bead against the wall, I booted to safe mode and used msconfig -advanced tab to "Force Compatibility Mode Disk Access:" MSKB Article ID: Q181966. And the computer started fine. Afterwards, I unchecked the option, and removed the 340Mb maxtor hd, and then the computer booted fine as well. I guess the old drive was too old for the board. I had used the same drive in a Win95 - P66 configuration, but of course that was a much older motherboard.