Have you tried logging the boot and then reading the boot log? If you press 'F5' (I think) like you would to enter safe mode, it's an option in the list.

Unless I'm mistaken, that only comes into play once Windows starts to boot. I'm not even getting that far during a reboot, where it seems to lock up after the BIOS messages.

Oh, I understand now. That's odd, maybe there's something wrong with the power management circuitry on the motherboard. Does it do the same thing when you "Ctrl + Alt + Delete" from dos?

When I used a DOS boot floppy and rebooted it rebooted successfully, but sat for about 30 seconds at “Starting MS-DOS”.

EDIT: I let a Windows reboot sit where I thought it crashed for a while and eventually got “Operating system not found”.

Sound like a dying hard drive. If you can, put it into another computer and scan it with HDD Regenerator, to check if it has bad sectors or delayed tracks. Something tells me that's the culprit.

I'll give that a shot shortly, but it's a new drive with a SATA-IDE adapter.

To get the boot menu, keep pressing F8 *before* the system begins to boot. DOS will detect the keypress and give you options, before Windows even gets out of the barn.

Sunoo wrote:

I'll give that a shot shortly, but it's a new drive with a SATA-IDE adapter.

Do you have a picture of that adapter? I have a bad feeling about it.

looking4awayout wrote:

Do you have a picture of that adapter? I have a bad feeling about it.

It's this one: http://ableconn.com/products_2.php?gid=66

I got it specifically it had the Marvell chip that people were saying was the best.

Okay, your comment gave me an idea to test. I dug out the semi-working IDE drive that came with the machine and installed that again. With that in place, it reboots perfectly.

Not sure where to go from here though. Can anyone recommend a SATA-IDE adapter that works better?

Back when I used a SATA to IDE adapter on my computer, I used a Delock one, it had a Marvell chipset and worked perfectly. Later I just switched to a SATA controller card, to avoid compatibility issues. I'd recommend you the Delock based on personal experience, your adapter seems to be a bit picky about your system (if it has a Marvell chipset, it might even have the dreaded SunPlusIT one, I've seen many of those falsely claiming they were Marvell based while they weren't in reality).

Now I don't remember which SATA controller supports Windows 95 (perhaps the Promise SATA150 TX2?), but there's one called the XFX Revo 64 that doesn't require any driver to work, as it masks itself as an IDE controller and runs basically transparent to the OS, from what I heard.

Sunoo wrote:

Okay, your comment gave me an idea to test. I dug out the semi-working IDE drive that came with the machine and installed that again. With that in place, it reboots perfectly.

Not sure where to go from here though. Can anyone recommend a SATA-IDE adapter that works better?

Trial & error from what I understand - bless old hardware. On Aliexpress, you can get several models quite cheaply - just try a few to see which work. I mean, you only need to install Windows once and then just swap the thing out. Having one that requires no drivers is of course ideal because that should *technically* work on every system but even then ...

Okay, I picked up a second IDE-SATA adapter, and also did some testing.

The only drives that reboot correctly are the 1.2gb IDE drive it came with and a 3gb IDE drive I happened to have. Every other drive I've tried (the smallest being 40gb), SATA with either adapter or IDE, does not reboot. So it appears to be related to disk size and not anything else?