Did you try a different PSU? If the hard disk is not the culprit, the only other thing that comes to my mind is weak 12v from the PSU.

I haven't, but I haven't got another PSU and can't afford one right now.

The P4 motherboard uses 12V and runs just fine. The P3 is too old for a 12V four-pin plug.

Theory:

I have two GPUs in - a Trident 9000, and an Nvidia GeForce. I was planning on having each work for different OSes (Trident in 3.1, Nvidia in 98). Could they be causing the system to mess up that would make the drive hiccup? I haven't gotten advanced enough into the system to install drivers before it goes sad on me, but I thought it was possible to have two GPUs in a computer without trouble.

Try ruling out software first. See if you can run an old Knoppix LiveCD/DVD (anything up to ~2005 should easily work on a P6). Same problems: hardware. No problems: software / drivers

It *has* to be hardware, surely? Initially it wasn't even finishing the windows install.

Bad caps.

ABIT was known for using crap Jackon caps on their boards. Replace them ASAP. I had the same thing happen to me (although it was an Albatron KM400 board) when trying to install 98 on a PC. It would hang just when the 98SE setup UI would load on a gray screen. I later found out that the board was missing caps (although not enough to make the board not POST and be usable for DOS) but at that point I had got a Gigabyte GA-7VA and didn't care about it anymore.

TL;DR version - recap it. ABIT boards of that era were plagued by bad Jackon caps so hard it was the reason ABIT got a lawsuit.

Would anyone be able to recap it for me? I have no soldering skill.

I have had several of these mobo's with no problems. I have one setup right now with P3-500mhz. and Win98se.
Sounds like a bad CMOS battery. Did you replace the battery ?
A fresh $1.50 battery can work wonders.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_tr … r++cmos+battery

Battery replacement was the first thing I did.

Bad caps or possibly a bad motherboard. I ran into several Abit 440BX boards with strange problems in 1998-1999. BE6-2, BX133, BH6, ZM6.... There used to be an article somewhere discussing a vendor's return rates of boards of that era. Abit didn't look good.

I still have a BF6 around that I recapped. It is very picky about what PCI cards go in each slot. I wouldn't call it rock solid in general but it's ok for a game machine.

Usually good to avoid the Highpoint ATA controllers they liked to integrate on boards of that time. I also try to use only PS2 input devices.

......

Guys....

It seems to be working all of a sudden.

Not sure what I did. I was in the midst of doing a series of final tests before I resorted to finding someone to recap it for me (trying different OS, trying memtest, etc) and as I had a spare 40GB HDD lying about I installed it as primary slave, so I had dual hard drives. Powered up, installed W98... and it didn't die.

Before I went any further I was tampering with video resolution settings on my Trident and I managed to bodge that, so it went out of range of my monitor. Then it stopped POSTING entirely. Shit.

So I reset CMOS settings and everything went back, and it's been pretty good since,

I SWEAR I reset the CMOS when I changed the battery. But maybe what happened was when I flashed the BIOS I should have reset the CMOS again. I dunno.

It freezes if I have a PS/2 mouse and a USB flash drive at the same time though, but given this ordeal, I'm happy. It still gives off a vibe of shakey though.

I have a few Abit BH6 and BX6. I really don't care for the bios options.
They are more troublesome than Asus or Intel mobos.
I remember I had the same problems trying to get mine setup with large hard-drives that the bios did not support.

gladders wrote:

Theory:

I have two GPUs in - a Trident 9000, and an Nvidia GeForce. I was planning on having each work for different OSes (Trident in 3.1, Nvidia in 98). Could they be causing the system to mess up that would make the drive hiccup? I haven't gotten advanced enough into the system to install drivers before it goes sad on me, but I thought it was possible to have two GPUs in a computer without trouble.

What? You have TWO VGA cards in your machine? Especially a legacy Trident card and a more modern GeForce? Both are probably trying to serve as a VGA card and have overlapping BIOS and RAM areas. I think they should conflict plenty. Back then you couldn't stick in two VGA cards. One VGA and one Hercules or MDA was ok, because they had different I/O ports, RAM addresses and BIOS addresses.

Also, why the 9000? It does not have acceleration or anything and the GeForce should run 800x600 just fine under Windows 3.1.

I just gave up with a bx6 too. I feel bad since it's a very nice motherboard, despite some design issue on the first version (ide/floppy connectors placement is very annoying ).
The problem I had seems to be related to IDE. Sometimes windows 98 would randomly hangs at startup. The zip drive I installed was never recognized by windows even if correctly detected during post. The CD-ROM drive even disappeared from Windows for no reason. I've checked the ram, 0 errors. I was wondering if the sata/ide adapter I use may be an issue (it's connected to an SSD) but I remember using it on another computer without problems.
In the end I've switched to another mothboard, with another power supply and a hard drive instead of SSD, and everything is working now. I still have the bx6 setup so I may try to find the exact source of the problem if someone is interested (I admit I lack motivation by myself since I have a working setup now)

Please do. This problem has returned to my board all of a sudden 🙁

I can't afford to get another motherboard!