BIOS settings, cables, connectors.
Did you tried running them seperatly ?

If tinkering with the bios doesn't fix it and drives that are known to be working but were not used in this rig before report as bad chances are something board level has gone bad.

candle_86 wrote:

So my pentium 3 crashed, now windows wont boot, and it reports all hard drives are bad, I checked them with a usb cable adapter for both IDe and SATA and all drives report fine. I checked for bad caps and didn't find any. Any advice?

What is reporting that all hard drives are bad? What is the exact error message and when does it occur?

Maybe a bad motherboard controller ? Try another board if you can..

clueless1 wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

So my pentium 3 crashed, now windows wont boot, and it reports all hard drives are bad, I checked them with a usb cable adapter for both IDe and SATA and all drives report fine. I checked for bad caps and didn't find any. Any advice?

What is reporting that all hard drives are bad? What is the exact error message and when does it occur?

Windows, 9x states it is unable to continue as it is unable to detect a hard drive, while 2000 reports it has detected a problem on the hard drive and can not continue.

New cable first. Pentium 3 may have crashed due to a bad cable (for whatever reason). Cheap, fast and easy way to rule that out.

checked my cables also, i put my Promise TX2 133 into my X2 6000 rig and the hard drives work fine on it, they are detected, format and can be wrote to, including by Windows 98 and 2k installers. I also checked my SATA drives in the x2 6000 same as the ide drives they are working and can be installed. I'm just confused what could cause this on the P3, like i said i see no damaged caps

so tested so far

Western Digital 10gb IDE - Good
Western Digital 20gb IDE - Good
Maxtor 20gb IDE - Good
Western Digital 80gb IDE - Good
Western Digital 120gb SATA - Good
Seagate 250gb SATA - Good
Promise TX2 Ultra 133 - Good
4xRounded IDE Cables - Good
2xSATA Cables - Good
VIA VT6421A with Option Rom Bios - Good

I also removed all expansion cards except for Video and tested the IDE drives on the Highpoint ATA66 Controller and the BX440 ATA33 controller, same behavior

Ram memtest, it passes without any errors. System is not overclocked

Are Win98 and Win2k dual-booting from the same drive? I wonder if some system file or MBR got corrupted?

clueless1 wrote:

Are Win98 and Win2k dual-booting from the same drive? I wonder if some system file or MBR got corrupted?

they wernt and at this point I've wiped every drive clean with Windows 7 in diskpart using the clean command.

I can't make anything install Windows no matter which one reports the hard drive has failed

I would boot the pentium 3 to some variant of live linux, and see if it can work with the drives. That would tell you if the problem is on the hardware.

Try underclocking the cpu? Or temporarily popping another one in? Try different RAM, even if the current RAM passes memtest. Try re-flashing the BIOS?

From my understanding:
-whenever you try installing Win98 or Win2k, you get a hard drive error, and it doesn't matter if you use the onboard controller or a Promise add-in controller? That seems to rule out the Southbridge, if it happens on the Promise too. To me, that leaves the following suspects: BIOS, CPU, RAM, motherboard.

Cap damage is sometimes invisible, I've been told.

clueless1 wrote:

Try underclocking the cpu? Or temporarily popping another one in? Try different RAM, even if the current RAM passes memtest. […]
Show full quote

Try underclocking the cpu? Or temporarily popping another one in? Try different RAM, even if the current RAM passes memtest. Try re-flashing the BIOS?

From my understanding:
-whenever you try installing Win98 or Win2k, you get a hard drive error, and it doesn't matter if you use the onboard controller or a Promise add-in controller? That seems to rule out the Southbridge, if it happens on the Promise too. To me, that leaves the following suspects: BIOS, CPU, RAM, motherboard.

Cap damage is sometimes invisible, I've been told.

Ok ill check it with diffrent ram tonight and see what I get. I don't have any spare Slot 1 CPU's nor any spare Slot 1 boards, but I have ram and I can flash a bios

Tried another PSU?

Snayperskaya wrote:

Tried another PSU?

Good point. Definitely worth checking if you can.

I havn't tested the PSU yet, but thats a great point

If you have a multimeter, I would try checking voltages while it's running. You can't trust what the BIOS health monitor says, sometimes they're ridiculously off. But if you have a known good PSU to try swapping, that's also a good idea.
Depending what's wrong, sometimes it can be a board level problem that causes bad voltages or ripple. You can't measure ripple with a multimeter but you can check the voltage at least.
I don't know about that board, but sometimes the 3.3v supply is regulated onboard rather than using the rail from the PSU. If the board has overvolting options for the chipset/RAM then it's definitely regulating it onboard.
Try replacing the CMOS battery, or check it's voltage while installed and under load.
Also try a live linux CD/DVD as Aideka mentioned. It's useful to see if a completely different software environment ends up with the same problem on the same hardware.
I suppose it might be informative to boot up a dedicated disk diagnostic tool like HDAT2. Maybe it would clarify if it's actually finding (apparently phantom) surface errors on the disks or it's having basic problems communicating with the drive controller. I'm not sure how that information would illuminate how to proceed though.

Interesting that the same error occurs no matter what drive controller you use, what drive you use, and what cable you use, but only with this motherboard. All I can think of is an uncertain board level problem or a power issue (either bad voltages or too much ripple).

Have you tried resetting the CMOS to defaults?
Have you verified that all jumpers are set correctly? Especially I wonder if there are any jumpers that affect clocks or voltages. I know you said it's not overclocked but I wonder if there's any chance the PCI bus is unintentionally overclocked, and maybe it was stable for a while but now isn't. I don't know about this board but some boards use jumpers to set the PCI/FSB ratio. Others use a fixed ratio depending what FSB is selected, and if it's not one of the standard FSB settings the ratios they use tend to be overly aggressive.
Some boards have both a FSB jumper and then a BIOS option to change it. Those can be tricky - on those I've typically seen the jumper actually dictates the PCI/FSB ratio so if the BIOS is set differently, unintended PCI overclocking can result.

Is that CPU an 800/100 or 800/133? If the latter, try knocking it down to 600/100 instead. And if you want to try an underclocking experiment, go down 66FSB (in between values may overclock the PCI bus).

This is a longshot, but when you attempt to install Win98 or 2k on a drive, have you tried telling Windows to do a *full* format? I have run into rare occasions where for some reason Windows couldn't install successfully unless I did that. Apparently there was something going on with the drive that the quick format option failed to address, but full format did.
Some of the things you've tried seem to nearly rule this out, but I'd be tempted to try it anyway.

Tried a live linux the UBCD live linux for partitions as well as an older Ubuntu i had I think it was 5.10 🤣

they seem to work fine, so again really confused

Ok so I flashed the bios the onboard ata33 now see my drives, but my promise is still a no go

After having flashed the BIOS, make sure you've reset the CMOS. A corrupted bit somewhere in the CMOS, or one whose meaning has changed with a different BIOS version (and not necessarily exposed by any of the settings in the BIOS setup screen) could cause unknowable problems.

Does your promise card work any better in a different slot?

possible power issues, check PSU, CMOS battery.