I went through Fry's Special 3 ECS boards before I adopted this philosophy:

	Friends don't let friends buy ECS motherboards


So after the ECS fiasco, I bought an ASUS board as I wanted a big name 
brand.  The Fry's return specialist asked me if I wanted the Instant 
Exchange Warranty.  Hmmm....since I was buying a board as its 
predecessor failed, I said "yes."  6 weeks later ASUS mobo died 
(replaced for free).  18 months later ASUS#2 died (replacement was an 
Abit board, and was free).  2 months later, Abit died (replaced for 
free).  I'm now on Abit #2 - sure glad I spent the $30 for that Instant 
Replacement Warranty :)

George



Mark Jarvis wrote:
> 
> First, sad story: A month or so ago I bought one of those ECS Nforce3-A 
> motherboard/Sempron 3100+ specials at Fry's. I was basically unable to 
> get it to boot from my existing Linux & Windows installations. After 
> fighting for a (hellish) week trying to find a way to force booting from 
> the existing installations, I finally gave up and re-did all OS 
> installations. Thank goodness most of my data was in a separate data 
> partition and remained pretty much OK. (To add to my confusion, I could 
> use a Windows multi-boot diskette to start the boot, using its boot.ini 
> to transfer to an installation, then complete a windows boot as usual. I 
> could then see all drives & windows usable partitions, so the disks were 
> see-able, just not bootable!) It didn't help that a diskette drive and 
> power supply died during that time and that half of a pair of 512MB 3200 
> memory sticks was DOA.  !@#$%^&*!
> 
> OK, I'm now up & running,
> 
> When Linux kernels started to get too big to fit on a diskette, I was 
> relieved to discover Smart Boot Manager and have used it extensively at 
> home and at school to boot into any available Windows or Linux 
> partition. BUT--SBM no longer works on my machine! It doesn't even 
> display the partitions! Obviously, there is some sort of horrible 
> mobo/HD interaction at work here.
> 
> Has anyone else bought one of those ECS specials? What was your experience?
> 
> I was hoping that my problems were due to my HDs. They're biggish--two 
> 120s and a 160, but not really all THAT big. Since Fry's has the same 
> offer on again, I was thinking of upgrading my wife's box, hoping that 
> her smaller, older disks--two Maxtor 80s--would not be a problem. That 
> SBM thing, however, really bothers me.
> 
> Any comments, hints, experiences, and/or suggestions gratefully received.
> 
> -mj-
> 
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