Did you try to unplug the HDD to see if it boots from FDD? One reason might be a defective FDD drive. I can not remember if there are switches on the motherboard to overwrite boot priority in the BIOS setup. The adaptec does not need dos drivers for the disk, but for the CD if it is SCSI.
Figured this out, so i had to boot from the windows NT 4.0 Server Edition disk and it autoloaded the scsi drivers to recognize the SCSI controller before trying to detect the drives.
macroexp wrote on 2020-01-03, 04:48:I have a 16mb Matrox G200 in my Vectra XU 6/200. Good match for it - I couldn't get a TNT2 M64 to work well, the HP didn't like the BIOS.
I have a HP Vectra VA 6/200 Pentium Pro. I also had major issues with graphic cards. I coulnt get anything newer then 1997 to work.'
Then I found the solution. The problem is that newer cards has bigger VGA bioses.
The solution is in the BIOS of the motherboard. There are two settings that needs to be changed.
Memory above 1mb and memory under 1mb.
I had to try different combinations to get my cards to work. At the moment I am using a geforce 4mx 4000 PCI card.
Hello everyone! Long time lurker here, first time poster 😀. Sorry if I'm resurrecting this thread but I think this is kind of important and will help lots of users facing a similar issue.
Nothing wrong with the buses or your HDD on your Vectra. You need to set the jumpers on your hard drive to "CLJ" mode. This will show your bios a smaller hard drive so it won't go nuts and freeze the system when trying to boot.
Hope this helps!
Necrodude wrote on 2021-06-09, 20:39:I have a HP Vectra VA 6/200 Pentium Pro. I also had major issues with graphic cards. I coulnt get anything newer then 1997 to w […]
macroexp wrote on 2020-01-03, 04:48:I have a 16mb Matrox G200 in my Vectra XU 6/200. Good match for it - I couldn't get a TNT2 M64 to work well, the HP didn't like the BIOS.
I have a HP Vectra VA 6/200 Pentium Pro. I also had major issues with graphic cards. I coulnt get anything newer then 1997 to work.'
Then I found the solution. The problem is that newer cards has bigger VGA bioses.The solution is in the BIOS of the motherboard. There are two settings that needs to be changed.
Memory above 1mb and memory under 1mb.
I had to try different combinations to get my cards to work. At the moment I am using a geforce 4mx 4000 PCI card.
What BIOS version do you have? I have the latest I could find and that setting flat out doesn't exist in mine. It's overall very shallow in what you can change. I have version GZ.07.09
I'm having the same type of issue right now with my HP Vectra VA 6/200 MT. When using the original HP provided Matrox Millenium it works just fine in Win95 and 98SE. However, when using other cards, namely a Diamond 3dfx Voodoo Banshee and an STB Riva 128 I get problems. Once the graphics drivers are installed the entire system will freeze just after the startup sound. I tried different RAM, HDDs, Windows installs, sound cards and the only thing I could pin down is, that it ONLY happens if there is an ISA sound card in the system. It comes with an HP provided Soundblaster 16 PnP, I tried another SB16 PnP and an ESS Audiodrive. They all exhibited the same issue so it points to some BIOS incompatibility related to PCI/ISA function or there's something wrong with the ISA bus. The graphics cards DO work just fine if I use a PCI sound card but I'd like to keep the original HP SB16.
