Reflash the bios. The bios on those Intel boards use a flash type that forgets over 30 years. I have two boards, an Intel 450 and an Intel 440 socket 8. One worked but was flakey, the other didn’t post at all. Fortunately, Intel anticipated this and provided a basic reflash (from floppy) recovery option. There is a jumper to specifically do that, and a portion of the bios that uses a different (and more durable) recovery mini-bios.

That recovery with a new flash fixed the non-posting board completely and fixed the stability of the other board. Both now work flawlessly.

Give it a try, reflashing the bios might be all it needs.

<edit>

The board I had that didn’t post was also a venus board like yours, and became fully functional after reflash.

I'm using an Intel PR440FX. While installing NT4 I have to set MPS to 1.1 in the bios, setup will not see my SATA card properly while on 1.4. Once patched to NT4 SP6, then I can set it back again to MPS 1.4.

If that doesn't help, you could try Windows 2000 to verify the hardware before diagnosing NT4.

Edit: Looking at the manual the VS doesn't have the option, which makes sense for a single cpu. I don't know enough about how it works, if it just doesn't show it or doesn't report to the OS. The chipset still supports SMP, but maybe you can just not implement MPS if it's only going to have a single socket. My 1.4 symptoms were that NT4 could see the SATA card, but would always fail to load drivers in setup, it always worked in setup with the older specification.

With your NT4 becoming unstable, how big a drive are you using? I had CF issues with how it reported C/H/S values when queried as it was really an LBA CF. Checking with a dos utility my CF reports 62041 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. The NT4 installer/unpatched NT4 can only use 1024 cylinders, leaving me with 1024x16x63. With the expected 512b sectors, this allows only for 500MB addressable disk space with my CF cards until NT is patched.

For storage I am now using either Highpoint 1520 or 1640 as you get to use an SATA SSD, but with drivers for NT4/98/2000/XP. (Did have to update the bios on a Pentium 3 system before it would work in the 440FX!)

I install NT4 (in 500MB), patch to SP6, replace the boot loader with the one from XP. Then I clone to image with an old ghost version and restore into a bigger partition. This allows me to boot and use NT4 above the 8GB limit when combined with the Highpoint card as it supports LBA48.

Ricimer wrote on Yesterday, 20:07:

With your NT4 becoming unstable, how big a drive are you using? I had CF issues with how it reported C/H/S values when queried as it was really an LBA CF. Checking with a dos utility my CF reports 62041 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. The NT4 installer/unpatched NT4 can only use 1024 cylinders, leaving me with 1024x16x63. With the expected 512b sectors, this allows only for 500MB addressable disk space with my CF cards until NT is patched.

For storage I am now using either Highpoint 1520 or 1640 as you get to use an SATA SSD, but with drivers for NT4/98/2000/XP. (Did have to update the bios on a Pentium 3 system before it would work in the 440FX!)

I install NT4 (in 500MB), patch to SP6, replace the boot loader with the one from XP. Then I clone to image with an old ghost version and restore into a bigger partition. This allows me to boot and use NT4 above the 8GB limit when combined with the Highpoint card as it supports LBA48.

Sorry I forgot to specify, each drive I used was 8gb, I knew these older systems were picky with that. I tried manually setting it to use LBA since I've read they prefer that over other IDE translation settings and to no avail.

Hoof wrote on Yesterday, 03:40:

Reflash the bios. The bios on those Intel boards use a flash type that forgets over 30 years. I have two boards, an Intel 450 an […]
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Reflash the bios. The bios on those Intel boards use a flash type that forgets over 30 years. I have two boards, an Intel 450 and an Intel 440 socket 8. One worked but was flakey, the other didn’t post at all. Fortunately, Intel anticipated this and provided a basic reflash (from floppy) recovery option. There is a jumper to specifically do that, and a portion of the bios that uses a different (and more durable) recovery mini-bios.

That recovery with a new flash fixed the non-posting board completely and fixed the stability of the other board. Both now work flawlessly.

Give it a try, reflashing the bios might be all it needs.

<edit>

The board I had that didn’t post was also a venus board like yours, and became fully functional after reflash.

I updated the BIOS to the latest I could find here (1.00.18.CS1), I'm not sure if this is what you meant, I never had to use the jumper for this I ran the utility provided under a small bootable DOS floppy it creates.

Doesn't 1.00.18.CS1 support up to 128GB. I'm pretty sure i used an 120GB SSD on this board a few years ago, using a cheap IDE-SATA adapter. It worked well, much better than the SD card I was using. The OS was Win2k, and it runs much better with 512MB RAM (4x128MB edo do work in this board)

Modnark wrote on Yesterday, 21:21:

Sorry I forgot to specify, each drive I used was 8gb, I knew these older systems were picky with that. I tried manually setting it to use LBA since I've read they prefer that over other IDE translation settings and to no avail.

I'd try Windows 2000 first as it will be much easier to tell if the hardware is working if you use pnp. The only thing that might not work is usb under 2000, at least without some other bios option changes.

Ricimer wrote on Yesterday, 23:14:

Modnark wrote on Yesterday, 21:21:

Sorry I forgot to specify, each drive I used was 8gb, I knew these older systems were picky with that. I tried manually setting it to use LBA since I've read they prefer that over other IDE translation settings and to no avail.

I'd try Windows 2000 first as it will be much easier to tell if the hardware is working if you use pnp. The only thing that might not work is usb under 2000, at least without some other bios option changes.

I'll give windows 2000 a try, I've actually got it on CD and I did notice CD booting seemed to work under the latest revision.