In theory, you can press F8 when "Starting Windows 98..." appears and from the menu select the bootlog.txt option, but that probably won't tell you much that is useful.

Have you installed any motherboard or chipset drivers in this fresh 98SE install?

It might be worth trying to use HIMEMX in your config.sys, but otherwise I can only suggest trying to find different drivers.

If you just want to check whether the hardware is defective (which might be a good idea), then try a "live" Linux distribution loaded from a bootable CD or USB drive.

I can't seem to recall if there were updated drivers from Intel when you ran 98 on the 440BX chipset.
Would you by chance know where to find a different source of drivers?

Perhaps the website of your motherboard's manufacturer..?

Get driver 45.23. Drivers beyond 56.64 can cause freezes and BSODs on older motherboard chipsets like 440BX. 45.23 also tends to work best with pre-DirectX 9 games.

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-window … er-archive.html

Jorpho wrote:

Perhaps the website of your motherboard's manufacturer..?

Not that easy. It's an SBC that was sold under different brands.

Teknor Applicom T946...or Kontron PCI-946?

Neither OEM seems to want to admit this existed and thus have no documentation or drivers available but Windows at least seemed to be fine with it. It detected and loaded drivers for everything onboard, including the ethernet chipset.

Get driver 45.23. Drivers beyond 56.64 can cause freezes and BSODs on older motherboard chipsets like 440BX. 45.23 also tends to work best with pre-DirectX 9 games.

Grabbed the driver you suggested and here's what I noticed:
The moment the driver loads its video BIOS signs on (fyi, I'm running off the video output on the board above, and No, doing any of the above wile running directly off the cards in question changes nothing) and for a brief second you get told that Windows has initialized the driver and the screen is clean. Half a second later the image corrupts and the machine locks.

It does it on both cards. For the hell of it I also tried different PCI slots.

That's an interesting setup. And a strange failure. Maybe related to the rather unique hardware setup you have.

It's a passive backplane so unless it's not liking the bus length there's not much I can do.