It sounds like you have tried a lot, and to me this sounds like a power shortage. IIRC V4's are power hungry, and a corp-o-box will be as low-spec as they feel they can get away with. You might be pushing it too hard without even realising.

Either get more power in (does the V4 have aux power? A second PSU somehow safely running that might help), a bigger PSU for the system (or just a younger one), or (long shot) replace the HDD with something lower power, and disconnect the CD and physically remove anything else that can be.

progman.exe wrote on 2024-06-13, 01:06:

It sounds like you have tried a lot, and to me this sounds like a power shortage. IIRC V4's are power hungry, and a corp-o-box will be as low-spec as they feel they can get away with. You might be pushing it too hard without even realising.

Either get more power in (does the V4 have aux power? A second PSU somehow safely running that might help), a bigger PSU for the system (or just a younger one), or (long shot) replace the HDD with something lower power, and disconnect the CD and physically remove anything else that can be.

I would think that an FX5500 (basically a 5200) would use quite a bit more power than Voodoo4, but I can't say for certain.

Have you tried a clean Windows installation on the Aptiva? By clean I mean using standard Windows install media, not anything IBM specific.

Thank you everyone for their hints. I tried a different PSU, it didn't help. I thought to give it one more go and reinstall fresh Windows and try to install drivers with Voodoo4 in place. During installation of the IDE driver Windows hung again and I thought hmm, maybe that's it. So I went to BIOS and disabled UDMA and secondary controller. And had this idea to disable everything that is not needed to boot the system. And it worked! Then I started enabling things one by one and here it is - the USB controller causing the issue. It's a bit of shame because I sometimes use it, but hey I got Voodoo working.

Writing it here with the whole process, maybe it will help someone else.

MrCrocodile wrote on 2024-06-14, 00:11:

Thank you everyone for their hints. I tried a different PSU, it didn't help. I thought to give it one more go and reinstall fresh Windows and try to install drivers with Voodoo4 in place. During installation of the IDE driver Windows hung again and I thought hmm, maybe that's it. So I went to BIOS and disabled UDMA and secondary controller. And had this idea to disable everything that is not needed to boot the system. And it worked! Then I started enabling things one by one and here it is - the USB controller causing the issue. It's a bit of shame because I sometimes use it, but hey I got Voodoo working.

Writing it here with the whole process, maybe it will help someone else.

Nice! Glad to hear you found the issue!

It's possible you may be able to reassign the resources for either the USB controller or the Voodoo card in device manager.

Also, go into your BIOS and enable the "Reset Configuration Data" setting and then reboot (it is normal for the setting to be disabled again after reboot). Doing this may automatically reconfigure resource allocation in a way that works better for your setup, but I can't say for sure. I have never personally seen a Voodoo card conflict with a USB controller, so I'm not sure what the exact cause of this would be.

Have you checked if the USB controller REALLY works? Like connect something and check for function?

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-14, 05:10:

Have you checked if the USB controller REALLY works? Like connect something and check for function?

Yes, I used it to copy drivers.