Likely the board itself is unhealthy. Any blown / swollen capacitors that you can spot?

Hey thanks, i did a visual inspection yesterday and everything seemed fine on the back and front 🙁, but of course just visual inspection isn't enough.

I have a cyrix pr200 sitting around so guess i'll go for the hail mary and try it to see if it helps.

Forgot one thing: when i got the board the voltage dip switches weren't right (it came with the cpu and supposedly from a working system) so maybe the cpu wasn't too healthy to begin with if it was run with wonky voltages?

Anyway it's pretty much the one thing i didn't do yet so may as well do it.

But most likely there's just something wrong with the board, but caps look pretty good no bloating no corrosion anywhere, traces look a-ok too.

Setup is running pretty much everytime now but if i do it from the cdrom it always hangs, but if i copy the install files it goes fine, although if i try to delete a big directory on c: it will hang.

I guess another thing i could try is to get an ide adapter card and give it a shot, would be one more thing checked off.

Thank you!

If the CPU is run for too long at the wrong voltage it can suffer damage. Too low will probably just get you instability; too high may fry it over time. CPUs of that era generally had fewer protections built-in, so I would not rule out that possibility completely.

It can also be that some settings in the BIOS are wrong; have you tried resetting everything to default?

Yeah since i don't know how long it was ran with messy voltage with the previous owner so it can be that indeed.

Yeah i tried pretty much every configuration on bios, right now ram timings are at the slowest setting, disabled parallel ports disabled udma for install and reenabled it after installing the via drivers, even updated to the latest tried defaults turbo defaults etc, right now i installed it again and didn't fail to boot yet.

I really get an impression that it has something to do with the ide masters, i loaded up motoracer after installing directx9 and worked okay for the first level, then when loading the second level the cd kept reading and playing music but the pc hung up, also when installing motoracer from the cd it gave the 0e error, i also did try a brand new cd drive, tested like 4 in total to rule out any wacky stuff.

Guess it's time to find my external cd drive and do some further testing before i take it all out to replace the cpu.

Cheers!

Do you have some Promise IDE card tx100 or something to try connecting CD an HD to it?

Only have some via VT6421A pci card with me right now 🙁 which has ide and sata connectors which i used on linux before but doubt i could boot the hard drive with it but will try connecting the cd to it to help narrow down the issues.

Thanks for the help, this damn issue is really doing my head in, only time i had something similar happen before was on a pentium 3 build because a screw had gotten under it and was shorting the board, but already made sure that wasn't the case this time 😜.

I'll update when i try it with the via controller i have and an external cdrom drive and will order a decent pci to ide card because if it's the ide masters that are messed i guess i'll still find issues as long as i keep the hard drive connected there.

Okay small update, i tried connecting the cd drive to the VIA VT6421A just to test a game since i can't boot with it and installed windows drivers and got to test motoracer for like 30 mins, seemed to work fine, no blue screens no hangs, when i'm back from work i'll be able to test a bit better but damn if it's indeed that then what a pain in the ass hehe.

Yeah more testing and still no issues ever since i used the via controller just for the cdrom. Strange, maybe my board has the dma bug but i even disabled dma in the bios and played around with the fio modes and no luck, even with the channels disabled it still seems like the bios tries to detect them since on the self test part still takes as long as when it was detecting the hard drives.

Also it really seems to be slow finding the primary slave even without anything attached to it.

But well can't complain for now i guess since it's actually working! Would it be worth recapping the whole board due to this when it could just be the dma bug or just the caps near the ide channels?

Already ordered a Promise Ultra133 Tx2 so that i can switch the hard drive to it too but for now it seems that keeping the cdrom on the via card does the trick, having the cd drive on channel 2 and hard drive on channel 1 of the motherboard didn't help though, maybe it only affects cd drives for some reason, really one of the weirdest issues i've dealt with.

Thank you everyone for the help, will update when i get the promise card on monday, guess it can be useful if someone gets stuck in the same place as me with one of these boards.

Alright that solution worked quite well until it decided it had enough 😜, switched the cpu to a 6x86l pr200 now to test that and so far it's installing windows from the cd drive which it didn't before, will keep testing to make sure all is okay.

Damn problem from hell 😜.