First post, by a6n0rma1
First time poster, long time lurker on the Vogons area. I'd like your help knowledgable folks because I have spent more than 3 days troubleshooting my latest retro build to no avail. Let's start from the beginning.
I found myself cleaning my garage. More than 10 boxes gathered later and more than 100 old PC parts, I thought it would be a good idea to Mix'n'Match my best ones and make a Franken-PC for Win98/DOS gaming. I chose or basically was forced to use -since some parts refused outright to play nicely- a Pentium III 866Mhz CPU, an Iwill BD133u Motherboard, my trusty Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, a Sound Blaster PCI 128 (model CT4810), a Western Digital Caviar DW800 80GB HDD, a Pioneer DVR-111DBK DVD-RW, 9 sticks of varying sizes from 32mb up to 512mb of PC133 ram and a 3COM Fast Etherlink (model3C90B-TXNM). I never once used more than 512mb total ram since this is the max that this motherboard supports. (https://www.ultimateretro.net/motherboard/man … 13182884798.pdf)
The details of the build are as follows:
The HDD is Primary Master. The DVD-RW is Secondary Master. I tried every possible Hardware combination under the sun and right now I have this one. Just the Voodoo graphics card. One stick of ram, more specifically a Transcend 512M PC133 SDRAM (model 166842-0494).
The problems:
From the very beginning, no matter the hardware combination, the motherboard detects the CPU as a Pentium III 433E MHz. I can fix this by entering the IWILL Smart Setting BIOS menu and setting CPU clock as 133 and CPU Clock Ratio as 6.5. Then my CPU is recognized properly as a Pentium III 866 . Other BIOS settings I have right now, although I have tried every possible combination. FDC controller, COM 1, COM 2, Parallel Ports disabled. First boot device is CDROM. Virus Warning disabled. Drive A, Drive B none, floppy 3 mode support disabled, IDE HDD Block Mode enabled. No matter the settings / hardware combination, I can start my PC with cd rom support by using the win 98 CD. I fdisk my hard drive. I then start win98 setup, it all seems to be going well up to the point where it gets stuck on copying files needed for windows setup. The PC always freezes at this step no matter the hardware combination (I tried other HDDs, other DVD devices, having both devices on the same IDE channel as master and slave, other ram sticks, other graphics cards, other bios settings). I then thought to myself, wait a minute maybe fdisk is doing something wrong with the HDD since it is not period correct and is really large. I'll use my trusty gparted live cd to properly format the HDD and then try installing windows 98. Here is the other problem, as soon as the boot menu of gparted is loaded (the one where you have 30 seconds to make a selection) the pc freezes and the monitor goes blank. Always. This also happens with my plop boot manager live CD where I tried using a USB made with rufus to install Win98 since the motherboard doesn't support booting from USB. As soon as plop boot manager's menu is loaded the pc freezes and the monitor goes blank.
As you can see I already troubleshooted a lot. I am sure there is a small detail I am missing, or maybe even a combination of things. Any suggestions are welcome.
