One thing that occurs to me is that the hard drive might be too large. Do you have the latest BIOS? You could always try to limit the capacity by manually entering the parameters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCulATQ7GlM

cant be the hdd. i tried another 3 hdd all tested free of bad sectors. 1.2gb seagate , 1.6gb wd, and 2,4gb wd all ide.
as for bios is not the latest , but it should have worked with the small hdd 1.2gb , 1.6gb and 2.4gb

the 20gb hdd gets detected in bios properly, so i thing the bios supports it too.
thanks

note: the 3 hdd all tested free of bad sectors on another working computer!!

I think the Win95 installer needs to be run from a CD. I've never been successful trying to "sneak" the OS onto a drive, from a drive. Going to/from the same drive is not a great idea, anyway, as it is going to try reading/writing at the same time, making the process slow as f and beating the sh*t out of the hard drive. (unless you're installing to a different drive, I suppose)

Is there a specific reason you're trying to install C:-C:?

I'd recommend burning the w95 ISO properly and running the setup from there. If you don't have CDROM loaded onto your boot disk, you can add OAKCDROM.SYS to CONFIG.SYS and MSCDEX.EXE to AUTOEXEC.BAT of the floppy and it should work.

Or even better, if you can generate a Windows 98 boot disk, those are great.

i tried to install from c drive as i originally have tried at first from cd with the same results as above

i suspect its the motherboard at fault

but what component on the mb though?

The IDE controller is in this guy:

Oi, I feel you. I've had this problem quite few times, for various reasons. One time it was a bad IDE cable. It was a bad drive (multiple times) Another time I was trying to get IDE-CF to work. I was using too many controllers simultaneously. Etc.
It usually isn't the board, but I wouldn't rule it out. Always start with having only the bare-minimum attached. If you have a PCI IDE controller, that can assist is diagnosis. (and possibly "fix" the problem)

Read/write operations are good otherwise? I'm assuming they're fine, since you have w95 setup files copied onto it.

How did you partition the drive(s)? Try leaving the drive blank (no partition) and doing it "manually" with fdisk/format from the DOS boot disk (will leave you stuck with 2GB partition, but if it works, you'll just need a w98 boot disk for the newer fdisk with "large disk support")

To be honest i didnt try anothet ide cable. Or ife controller. But read write ops were good. So go figure ???

I didnt try fdisk method. I booted dos6.22 and run setup of win95 from both cd and also hdd. Setup freezing always.

I tried same method on my Pentium 2, pentium 3 and 486dx2 and those worked however.!!

Thats why i think it might be a motherboard issue!!

i have on it bios-g (71209B) on it with this string
01/22/98-580VPX-LGS3C-2A5LDV3HC-00 BIOS-G (71209B)

such version no where to be found even in retroweb , so even if i wanted to update the bios i cannot , as flashing diffrent bioses on it will brick it completely and must be then garbaged !!!

coxilerio wrote on 2025-05-24, 20:40:

[...]

as flashing diffrent bioses on it will brick it completely and must be then garbaged !!!

Hardly - the BIOS EEPROM is socketed, so if something goes wrong you can always pop it off and re-flash in an EEPROM programmer or if you don't have one, hot-flash from another board.

If you look at the BIOS images listed here: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcpart … ds-35-8804#bios

You'll see the ones with "PRIME3(C)" string are for LGS super I/O chip which is what your BIOS string indicates; I'd suggest 02/11/98-580VPX-PRIME3C-2A5LDV3AC-00 would be a pretty good bet given your "LGS3C"

why not 06/19/1998-580VPX-PRIME3-2A5LDV3AC-00 then. seems newer...

and where is bios-g in list of bioses. something tells me that the board is not VIB804DS but the VIB804DSe

pretty good betbut not entirely safe..

and even if i try to execute awardflash to update bios , the pc will con execute the comand. it will freeze like it does when i run c:\win95\setup.exe or setup.exe /is command

lock up and have to cycle it from power button or reset buttons

what a mess !!!

Another lifehack for bios swapping:
get a second eeprom
Boot with original rom
Start awdflash or uniflash or whatever you use
Swap bios chips
Burn new bios file
Reboot.

This way you make sure the original bios chip remains untouched and you always have a fallback if the new bios file bricks the board.

I just noticed that i cant even run awdflash to flash the bios

When typing on the keyboard in dos mode forgods sake the pc locks up and it must be reset...

Something is seriously wrong with this motherboard.!!!

Best scenario is to bin it !!! I guess...

It runs fine on floppies? Disconnect exerything except the floppy drive and boot/swap and load games/mem test/speedsys/ etc. to see how the computer works in general. If you say you have a P2/3 computer(s), install your drive in to that, install windows, then move the drive over.

So much to try still, don't give up on it yet! Older computers are just different and need relatively old hardware/methods to work.

Since you say it randomly locks up at DOS prompt, I'm inclined to think the CPU or memory has failed/is failing. If you have other CPU/mem to test, that would be good to try as well. Maybe the cache is failing, try disabling. Boards are TANK-Y, and should be the LAST suspect.

Getting a POST card installed could help, as well. It might set codes when the computer locks-up.

Which CPU are you currently using? If you're not already at 50MHz FSB/mem clock with that K5, try underclocking to both de-stress CPU and clock the RAM lower. If possible I'd suggest also testing with a P54 (Pentium) just to be sure there's no strange compatibility thing going on.

Any cpu i try same result

Any psu ram vga keyboard hdd cd drive same results