I recently acquired an Asus MEW-AM motherboard, which is based around the Intel 810. Specs of the system I put together:

Celeron 500 (Mendocino) w/ stock heatsink fan
256MB DIMM (PC100)
450w PSU w/ 20A on +5v
PCI nvidia FX 5500
SB Live 5.1 (non OEM)
StarTech 1GB NIC
SATA HDD (2.5) connected via IDE adapter
DVD drive
2x Case fans

Inside BIOS I disable:

• Both serial ports

• parallel port

• floppy drive

During Windows 98 SE install I get a BSOD at PNP detection step:

During reboot I notice there was an IRQ conflict with the NIC and sound card, so I pull NIC from the system. Boot back into the installer and it continues smoothly. Once in Windows 98, I proceed to start installing drivers. I attempt the Intel chipset drivers first and they fail to install with a message about how I need a supported chipset and operating system. These are the drivers that came with the motherboard (official Asus disk) so I find this odd. I then track down every version of these drivers (thanks Phil!) and they too fail in the same manner:

• 3.20.1008

• 4.10.1012

• 5.02.1003

• 6.3.0.1007

I decide the flash the BIOS to newest non Beta version (1002.A). This goes smoothly, but once back in Windows, the behavior is the same. I then decide to skip these for now and try nvidia drivers. No luck, package (56.64) says it can't find a supported GPU. I go poking around in device manager and notice there are no unknown devices, which should be the case if its seeing anything PCI related:

I yank all the PCI cards (SB, NIC, GPU) and its the same issue (I'm unable to install the chipset drivers). Out of curiosity I click 'refresh' in device manager and the machine crashes.

I then go on an OS installing spree to see if any difference...

• Windows ME (same issue)

• Windows 98 (first edition, same issue)

• Windows 95d Lite (hangs during first boot post install with an error which I didn't capture but I was essentially stuck in a boot loop)

At this point, all I can figure is the motherboard is bad 🙁 Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious?