PC hangs after soft reset (CTRL+ALT+DEL or restarting Win98) \ VOGONS

PC hangs after soft reset (CTRL+ALT+DEL or restarting Win98)

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First post, by schlang

Posted on 2025-07-15, 18:10

schlang Offline

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Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 664
Joined: 2009-01-05, 04:57
Location: Medellín, Colombia

Hello, I switched the mainboard in my K6-III rig and everything works perfectly except for the soft reset.
When I press the reset switch, it's fine.
When I power off, it's fine.

But whenever I press CTRL+ALT+DEL in DOS (or selecting restart in Windows 98) it would hang right before you would see all the machine details.
All you can see is the blinking cursor and no more inputs are registered from keyboard.

It goes from this:

The attachment softreset1.png is no longer available

into this:

The attachment softreset2.png is no longer available

Any ideas? I already tried different K6-III+ CPUs and it's the same with all of them.

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Reply 1 of 3, by schlang

Posted on 2025-07-16, 11:05

schlang Offline

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Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 664
Joined: 2009-01-05, 04:57
Location: Medellín, Colombia

I ruled out keyboard issues because when executing ECHO G=FFFF:0000 | DEBUG it also hangs with the blinking cursor

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Reply 2 of 3, by schlang

Posted on 2025-07-17, 16:06

schlang Offline

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Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 664
Joined: 2009-01-05, 04:57
Location: Medellín, Colombia

Update: I removed all PCI and ISA cards, but same result

Tried other graphics cards:

Gf4 4200 AGP: same result
Gf3-500 AGP: PC doesnt boot at all
Gf2 Ultra AGP: same result
Riva128ZX PCI: hangs after soft reset with garble graphics
The attachment softreset3.jpg is no longer available
Riva128 PCI: PC doesnt boot at all
MGA-1064SG PCI: PC doesnt boot at all
ET4000AX ISA: hangs at cursor but also PC speaker has one lasting tone that never stops

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Reply 3 of 3, by momaka

Posted on Yesterday, 00:43

momaka Offline

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Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 606
Joined: 2024-02-23, 16:08
Location: Bulgaria

In general, whenever you see graphics corruption from a PCI graphics card that's known working fine in another system and not known to be a failure-prone GPU (e.g. some VooDoo GPUs), then the issue is more than likely data corruption related to the Southbridge.

Given that both PCI and ISA devices (GPUs) seem to be having issues on your system, it looks like there's some data corruption associated with the Southbridge. Could be a multitude of reasons for this: a failed/failing Southbridge (very unlikely) or possibly one with bad solder connections on the pins, or bad caps on the mobo or inside the PSU. If any component is running over-clocked, that can also be part or entirely the problem.
More details about the hardware would help. In some cases, pictures can also be useful to post.

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