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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