hi guys i need some suggetions...
a friend asked me to format his pc, after formatting and continues with win98 installation, the pc shutsdown during scandisk. (note that the same pc showed symptoms a week before formatting). same thing happens when rebooted.

here are the specs. redfox mb (generic mb), 600mhz cpu, 30gb hd, 32mb tnt nvidia, 128mb ram (pc133), 56k int. modem.

i've tried all his pc pheriperals in my pc but they all worked fine, tested cpu & ps and worked fine.

When the modem is taken out, the pc does not boot at all. i suspected a bad mb...could i be correct???

I tried taking out all connections to hd/cd-rom only leaving connections to fdd and booting with a clean bootdisk and restarting the pc after the a:/ prompt appears then connecting the connections to hdd while restarting...the pc then boots up and continues to windows (note this is after i installed win98 to his hdd from my pc hoping that everything will work fine with his pc but to no avail.) i did this several times and it works.
how can this happen??? I find it weird...

so my friend takes his pc home...when he boots the pc in his house the same promblem comes back...

the cpu fan works well though it stops sometimes kinda dirty...could this be the reason? if it is...how can you explain the modem???

note that there are no errors on hardware settings...all drivers are installed with his pc not with mine. there are no exclamation on hardware profiles...nor any irq conflicts...

any suggestions would be a great help...

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From your description it sounds very unlikely to be a bad mb and very likely to be a bad CPU fan. If the CPU fan stops sometimes, this can cause the system to fail. I would at least clean it out with canned air and possibly replace it.

It also could be a software problem. I had trouble sorting out what you did with it, but it sounds like the problem started after you installed Windoze and that suggests that you may have a bad install. You might try wiping the hard drive and starting over, or just reinstall. If it gets stuck, see if you can proceed in Safe Mode.

A third option is that the hard drive is bad or going bad. I would download the hd maker's utilities and test it.

As for the modem, the most likely possibility is that you knocked something lose when you took the modem out. There is no logical reason why the absence of a modem should cause a system failure.