I bought an Athlon 500MHz with the approved motherboard by Asus over a week ago, plus the Athlon approved power supply
and cooling unit.

I plugged it all together in an ATX case with my old memory (which
is 100MHz without parity) and my old HDD - 2Gb Seagate. I also
used an Ati Rage Fury (32MB) AGP graphics card and a Creative Labs
24x CD ROM drive.

I turned it all on and began to install Windows NT 4 (workstation).
It copied the install files to the HDD and began to install from the
hard drive copy. After about 32% it kept saying that various files
were corrupt or missing then bluescreened. I re-started the install
and it did it again. I then turned it off and opened the case to
see if it was running hot, but it was about skin temperature.

So, I took out that HDD and put in another one and tried again. The
same thing happened. Then I tried a different NT CD - same thing
again... bluescreen. I then decided to try a Windows 98 install
and this time it wouldn't look at the right drive to install from.
I then tried Windows 95 and had similar trouble with that. I then gave
up for a few days and rebuilt my old machine from the bits. After a
couple more days I had time to try again so reconstructed the new
machine and this time put in an old 540MB Quantum HDD that had
been repartitioned and formatted as FAT16 and tried to install
DOS 5. This time it kept saying that the drive had been locked
for use with long filenames and refused to install... which is daft!

Anyone got any ideas? Do I need a patch or something? Or is this likely to be a hardware problem?

Locked for use with long filenames: boot from your DOS disk (not any type of win9x setup disk) and do an FDISK to delete partitions. If this won't run, do an FDISK /MBR. Repartition the drive. This should allow a DOS install via FAT-16.
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Try a different HDD cable. Let the BIOS autodetect your chosen IDE drive. Now that you have a valid FAT partition, get your CDROM drivers to work, and try winnt /b to get the NT install running again. (Or use winnt if you need the NT setup disks). Unlikely, but possible is that the HDD controller on the MB is faulty.

Other folks might have different/more insight.

Have you tried installing all of the setup files on to the harddrive and install from the hard drive. copy the folder i386 to c: drive then type winnt /b to install from the harddrive. do this after you do what the guy above has said..

Thanks guys. While I'm waiting for a replacement on the mobo and CPU (in case there's something dodgy going on there) I'll go for the route of starting up from an old DOS 5 disk and FDISKing from there, though I'm pretty sure I've tried that already at some point in the saga... and yes, I've tried different IDE cables: surely if it were the cabling it wouldn't fail consistently at the same point?

Basically, I was wondering if anyone knew of any problems installing NT (or any other OS) on Athlon based machines, in case I needed a patch or something.

We'll see what happens... and thanks again.

Athlon,I think the problem is with the Athlon aretechture as NT was orginally designed around the i386 archetecture, but the Atlon is simply a new archetecture altogether which is emukating an i386 archetecture to run IMB-PC software. Personally I would replace the board for and ASUS P3B-F and a PIII 500

I beg to differ here... I've seen plenty of Athlon NT systems on sale from lots of vendors. They can't all be selling duff machines! I really think it is a case of a dodgy motherboard here.

AMD certainly can't afford to risk their flagship processor being incompatible with Microsoft OSs. It'd be like digging their own grave!

I'm still waiting to send back the parts for replacement though...

It's probably the memory. I just built an Athlon-600 using an FIC SD-11 mainboard, all kinds of random errors and reboots during installation of NT, 98 and Redhat linux 5.2;

In short, they are VERY VERY memory-sensitive. I finally got it to work with a particular 128MB PC100 ECC DIMM; PC133 non-ECC and PC133 ECC that I tried didn't work -

For a complete description of my problems, look in the windows 9x forum; the message header is "Athlon Headaches".

Believe me, memory memory memory. AMD told me the same thing.
If you're using an FIC board, there's a list of recommended RAM in the Compatibility Test results; for an MSI-6167 there's a list on AMD's web site.

Well... thanks for all your help and comments guys. The final solution was a combination of bogart's fdisk using an DOS boot floppy and the fact that there wasn't enough power!
I had the thing plugged into a 4-way gangboard which had devices on it that were just drawing too much power so the Athlon box wasn't getting enough. This was why it would periodically not even power up. So, I've shifted it to sharing a power socket with just the hub and it is much happier. Fdisking from an old DOS floppy solved the other problem, though why I couldn't install Win95/98 is a mystery. Still, it is all up and running now and thanks Joe for the tip about memory as I'll be aiming to get some in the new year (I'm using an Asus mobo so hopefully there will be info about that on AMD's site).

You guys are scarrin me. As it is right now, I have just recieved the ASUS SlotA K7V mobo, and the Athlon 700mhz "ThunderBird", and 128MB PC-133 NEC memory, all highly recommended for doing just what you guys are speakin of, installin NT and Linux. Do I have somethin to be worried about now?

Bottom line AMD does not know what the hell they are doing. The chips suck and many are mismarked voltages etc....

As for your locked drive reboot to dos and
type lock c:

This will enable the os to write to the drive and install again.