hdw, may be somewhat OT

[Mark Jarvis]

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-