Are you installing the SPs? Does it lock without the Radeon drivers?

Set PCI latency to 32 in the bios, if its PCI and not defaulting to that already, you can try raising it, but the SB card probably won't like it.
Disable Agp-Fastwrites, if its AGP.
Makes sure your SP4 pack is installed and the later Roll-up packs.
And make sure your mobos chipset drivers are installed, after the SP updates.

SP4 installed. The mainboard doesn't have any of those fun options in BIOS, I believe. It is an Asus K8S-LA Micro-ATX board.

I can't seem to provoke the crash reaction with the AiW removed, but it's hard to say how reliable the circumstances of the crash are. I'll have to try another card and see what happens.

AidanExamineer wrote:

Well, I ran Memtest, which turned up no errors. I ran ChkDsk and the drive came up with 8 gigs worth of bad sectors. Thinking that was the obvious problem, I reinstalled Win 2000 on a Seagate 40GB PATA drive (with SeaShield anti-static cover).

Have you tested the current hard disk? I like using HDAT2 for this, but maybe chkdsk is sufficient.
You could also try the Prime95 torture test. This stresses the CPU/chipset/RAM but not the disk.

Check the windows event log under control panel, admin tools, event viewer. See if anything concerning shows up in there.

It could also be a power issue. Unfortunately a Compaq BIOS isn't going to let you see the voltage levels, unless maybe it can be done through software. Most likely the only way to check the voltages would be to measure with a meter.
It's interesting though that the windows install went smoothly. Usually if there's some hardware instability, the Windows install will have problems. So it might be a driver issue, or a problem with some device (such as the video card) that doesn't act up until it's driver has been installed. If it doesn't lock without the video card driver that would suggest a problem in that area.

I'm not sure the ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP (what a mouthful) is compatible with your board. That name sounds like it could be an early 3.3v AGP card, but I don't know much about Rages so I could be wrong. Late AGP boards used to give warnings about not using 3.3v cards with them. Assuming the board and card are keyed correctly then it shouldn't be possible to plug anything that's incompatible though.

Oh wow thats a AMD SiS based motherboard.
I have no experience with those 🤣 .
Just Via and Nforce.
Maybe someone here has tried that combo before.

As for AGP most of the time you can't plug a 2x card into a 4x\8slot.
Keyword most. Link to the AGP compat stickler page just for safety sake.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

AlphaWing: I think it's a PCI card, but afaik the AGP version of the AIW is universal AGP. But the drivers may not be playing nice with the chipset drivers or Win2k (esp if Win2k isn't patched up and/or you're going with newer ATi drivers that rely on .NET/Visual C/etc (and yes they'll install without those things loaded and then just crash or do other weird stuff)). How new/old are the drivers you're trying? With something based on an original Radeon you can back all the way up to stuff that was contemporary to Windows 2000 and probably not have any issues, and if you haven't tried that, I'd do so and see if that clears things up at all. If it's still crash-tastic, but pulling the card eliminates it (and it doesn't repeat on a new card), I'd just recycle the card and get something new (and an A64 3400+ really deserves something like a 6600GT anyways).

From images I could find of the board, it's a Socket 754 CPU.

I'd say if Windows XP is running stable there is not much point in installing w2k on that machine.
CPU compatibility shouldn't be an issue. The only issues I know of are that some CPUs may be so fast to trigger an error on older OSes (Win95 IIRC), and that SMP is not supported by Win9x (additional cores are just ignored).
The Radeon should be fine, I had a Radeon 9600 AGP running under w2k (GA-6VTXE, Tualeron with VIA 694T chipset).

Its a Socket 754 based CPU. I have a Compaq with the same board/CPU that I'm in the process of stripping and trashing (that should tell you something). It came to me with a broken retainer for the northbridge heatsink. Being a SiS based board, I didn't give it a second thought before ripping it apart. The only thing valuable about it was the 1GB DDR800 sticks it had installed. If you need any manuals, I have the original Compaq packet.

. The only issues I know of are that some CPUs may be so fast to trigger an error on older OSes (Win95 IIRC), and that SMP is not supported by Win9x (additional cores are just ignored).

W2K doesn't have speed issues and supports SMP so that is a nonfactor.

If I were to take a guess I would say its a video card issue.
2000 is usually quite stable

I did forget to mention that I checked the new drive with GWScan, which didn't report any errors.

Win XP wasn't running stable, probably because of an old (and perhaps twice recovered) install, and a dying hard drive. Thought I'd try my hand at 2k because it's specifically stated to work with this AiW Radeon, (which is a 32MB PCI version), and because it has better compatibility with stuff like MechWarrior 3.

I'm still testing permutations of card w/ drivers, card w/ no drivers, drivers w/ no card, etc. I'll post again when I know more.

I'd say:

Pull everything out that's not needed, extra hard drives, cdrom, floppy, USB devices, 1 ram stick, BARE MINIMUM TO BOOT
Reset BIOS to defaults.
Run memtest for 24 hours.
Run stressCPU from UltimateBootCD

Try running Windows in safe mode and see if everything works there.
Try a Linux LiveCD.

I've had a similar Problem with a P3 and WinMe... during First Run after Installation lots of Errors and Scandisk also found lots of Errors.

Cause was, the people from which i got the PC has flashed a wrong BIOS.

After flashing with the correct Version it runs stable for 10 Year now.

This hard drive checks out with GWScan and chkdsk. Running Memtest for several hours didn't provoke any kind of crash.

With the AiW removed, I cannot cause the lockup even if I click like a madman through menus and such. 😁 Assuming the issue is with the card (compatibility, drivers, or something else), I switched to a new card to try again.

With an Nvidia TNT 2 M64 (AGP) installed, it crashed on the 2k desktop (not a lockup, an instant forced restart). Upon restart it threw a strange error code on the login screen, and did it again. Upon restart AGAIN!!! it seems to be fine, and once again I cannot provoke a crash.

Next step was to install the drivers. Nvidia's download for legacy drivers points to a missing file, so I found another host of their Forceware 60 drivers. Those failed to install. I found a link on Dell's website to a TNT2 M64 driver install package (non-exe, just zipped up vxd files and such). I went to install it... and I got a series of windows explorer crashes while pulling the file off of the thumb drive. Before I could try the drivers it threw another explorer error, and this time locked up hard.

So does Win 2k dislike these cards? Does the processor dislike 2k? Does the whole set of computer bits refuse to work with each other? 😖 I'm a bit confused. I may have to drop this project and accelerate my Win 98 build instead.

What kind of power supply?

memtest doesn`t always find errors. try only one stick at the slowest timings if possible and see what happens. When locking up, try the other stick.

Most problems i had with win2000 and winxp were memory related or psu related.

Power supply could be the culprit. It's a 250w "BesTec."

Ran MemTest for several hours last night on each individual stick, in either slot and no configuration caused any errors or any lockups. Then I ran MemTest with both sticks in (2x 1GB 400mhz DDR). The first time it froze up with a strange visual glitch (screen corruption all over). Even with the text being almost illegible I could still make out all the red bars indicating memory errors. I tried again and it did the same visual glitch but with no corruption.

Strange result. I put in a different stick in (1x1GB Crucial branded) and am testing it.

AidanExamineer wrote:

Power supply could be the culprit. It's a 250w "BesTec."

What's the model number of that Bestec? If it's the ATX-250-12E, then you've got a potential problem.

ATX-250-12Z

My searching suggests it's not as risky as the 12E, and it does seem to be a fairly well constructed PSU. I'm sure the caps aren't of the highest quality, but it doesn't look dangerous.

Not really sure what to do with this. With a new single 1 GB stick of RAM in, I can't get the Memtest glitch anymore, but it still does the freeze issue with the AiW, and the lockup issue with the TNT2.

I'll try swapping in a newer power supply and see what happens. At this stage my best guess is bad board, or bad processor.