problem building Epox 7KXA Athlon system!

I bought an Epox 7KXA motherboard, Athlon 700 CPU, and 64M of PC133. To this I added a Maxtor 20G EIDE hard drive, floppy, and CD-ROM.
The system seemed stable until installing Windows 98. I got past the first part where it runs scan disk. Then it "Prepares installation wizard", gets to 100%, and then just hangs and freezes. After dozens of attempts I finally gave up and tried installing Windows 95 and it did essentially the same thing.
What am I doing wrong? I tried enabling PNP in the bios. I also upgraded to the latest bios. I've scoured the web for hours with no solutions. PLEASE HELP I'M AT THE END OF MY ROPE

1. RE: problem building Epox 7KXA Athlon system!
lbyard Aug-10-00 04:59 PM
In response to message 0

Here are some suggested steps…
Pull all boards except video.
In the CMOS Setup disable both COM ports and USB (may be two places that have be disabled for USB)
Fdisk and part the drive. I would make a a 2 gig C: drive for a 5,400 hard disk and a 4 gig C: drive for a 7,200 RPM drive
Format C: but do not install the system files with the /s flag or SYS
To eliminate the CD (scratched) and CD-ROM copy the cab files to the hard disk and install from the hard disk (see http://duxcw.com/digest/Howto/software/windows/cabs/movecabs.htm and http://duxcw.com/digest/Howto/buildcom/athlon/ath_8.htm for details)
But, first disconnect the CD-ROM.
If it hangs a freezes, wait a long time and see if an error pops-up.
You may have bad memory.
Try Epox’s newsgroup (news.epox.com)
Please let us know how you fixed it.
Larry

2. RE: problem building Epox 7KXA Athlon system!
terracore Aug-15-00 06:39 AM
In response to message 1

The problem was the CD-ROM drive. It was reading OK but not passing the information correctly. It now occupies the landfill and Windows installed fine. Thanks!