I'm not impressed by ATI or by Shuttle

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I just bought a Shuttle AK31 and an Athalon 1800+ for my first build. All went well untill I installed Windows 98. The first thing I did after installing it was install the mobo drivers but this caused the system to freeze on restart. It said "setup will now update your configuration files", then it said it had done that and would continue to load windows. I left it for 10-15 minutes and it did nothing. The HDD was not working so I reset the comp. It did its normal scandisk, then it desided to do a surface scan. Most of the time it just froze at the beginning but every now and then it will do the surface scan and say the there were errors writing to the drive and the freeze.

I reformated the HDD and reinstalled Win 98 and the drivers and I got the same thing. Next time I reinstalled I left the drivers out and all went okay untill I put in the drivers for my ATI video card. It ran okay for a little while but then the screen just went dead. It happens everytime I restarted too. I could load it up in Safe Mode and uninstall the drivers but whenever I put them back in I get the same problem. I've downloaded the latest drivers from ATI but all that did was give me an error message saying that I had "system incompatabilities" and that the video buffer could not be used so I could not use video acceleration, then the screen went dead.

I tried just installing the mobo driver that had to do with the hard drive (it enabled UDMA) but that cause the same problems. I'm reformatting AGAIN and I've just got the updated mobo drivers from Shuttles website.

I read in their FAQ about how Ati products that were AGP had the problem I'm having and they sugested changing the AGP slot to 2x then installing the drivers and then changing it back to 4x but that won't solve my problem since I have a PCI card.

Details:
Athalon 1800
Shuttle AK31
Ati Radeon
WD 10Gig HDD
Windows 98

Any help would be appreciated.

[HAL9000]

Download the latest VIA 4 in 1 driver and install it, then install your video driver.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

It doesn't seem to matter what version of the driver I use, it always seems to stop the OS from reading or writing to the HDD. I put in the latest drivers and got the exact same problem.

[glc]

Maybe you need to run Data Lifeguard and make sure the hard drive is OK - and maybe try different ram.

[Pal44]

I had simular problems. I found out it was a defective 80 pin cable going from the motherboard to the harddrive. Check your ribbon cables to make sure they are not defective or installed backwards. My solution was to replace with new rounded cables.

[Alfie]

If this is Win98se,the only drivers that you need as far as the motherboard are the agp and chipset driver,avoid the Via busmastering driver,as Win98 will do a better job.
Uninstall the video drivers,make sure assign irq to video is enabled in bios.
Make sure video has an irq of it's own and isn't sharing with another device.
How do you have the hard drive jumpered and what type of ribbon are you using(80 wire udma or 40 wire standard)?

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Thanks for all the help guys, I solved the problem by switching my CD IDE cable (40 wire) and my HDD cable (80 wire) and that solved all my problems. I'm not sure how or why but it all runs perfectly now.