P6BAT-A+ memory problem

[mitsos1os]

Hi guys. I could use some help here. A friend of mine gave me a desktop to fix for him. It has the P6BAT-A+ motherboard along with a slot 1 Pentium III 733 Mhz and a 133mhz 64mb sdram. It had Windows 98 on it and it worked. I thought that I should give it a try and install Windows Xp. And here is where my problems began. During the XP initial installation part, where it says copying installation files, an error pops out stating that it cannot copy files maybe a bad cd or somthing. I tried it a few times with no result. So I believed that maybe because it had a really old CD ROM Drive. I hooked up one DVD -RW of mine but it gave the exact same error on the same file. Then I started to get suspicious. After searching the web, I found that this error during xp install is almost always related to memory problems. So I run Memtest and voila!!! After one point on the test, errors started happening endlessly.... This is also curious, because memtest states that if so many errors happen (instead of a couple), then it has something to do with the bios not reading properly the memory and writing on non existent memory pages. However the bios reads the amount of ram correctly. I also tried the ram stick on an other pc and it completed the memtest with no errors. Even tried on the P6BAT-A+ with an other stick but with the same result. After many hours of searching, I found that maybe the board isn't compatible with this cpu.....No clear answer. I manually set it in bios, vcore, clock....Anyway, I just want to install XP on it, because right now it is empty. How did it work before with Windows 98? Please any suggestions would help.

 

[bryanl]

Some of those old ECS motherboards didn't like running the memory at 133 MHz, probably due to badly chosen default BIOS settings. I encountered this with their K7S5A Pro and P4SA2, which defaulted to 100 MHz FSB and would reset to that speed if 133 Mhz was chosen.

 

[mitsos1os]

Finally I found it. I had to force the processor to use 100 fsb instead of 133 which is the factory default for this cpu. It seems the motherboard does not accept above 100 mhz fsb cpus. Anyway, with these settings I was able to complete windows setup and memtest without any errors.thank you for your time!!!