VOGONS


First post, by precaud

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I pulled all of my remaining hair out yesterday trying to suss his out.

Setting up a dual-boot 98SE and XP rig on an Asus P2B-F with 1GHz SL4BS P3. Both OS's are installed and boot up fine. Only the graphics card is installed at this point.

XP runs fine for as long as you want. But boot into DOS or 98 and it hangs/locks up within 2-3 minutes. It does this whether you go into normal mode, Safe mode, command prompt, or boot into DOS separately from a floppy.

I've swapped RAM, changed timing settings in the BIOS, anything timing-related I could think of, but no diff.

Any idea what might be causing this? I'm stumped.

Reply 1 of 27, by dr_st

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Boot into DOS separately from a floppy, leave the machine idling at the command prompt for 2-3 minutes, come back to it, and it's locked up?

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Reply 2 of 27, by precaud

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Last night, yes. This morning, booting from floppy is not hanging (after 10 minutes, anyway)... normal and safe mode 98 still does.

EDIT: OK, it took longer, about 12 minutes when booting DOS from floppy this morning.

Reply 3 of 27, by ShovelKnight

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In early 2000s I had a 440BX machine that was hanging every 5-10 minutes in Windows 98 but worked fine in Windows 2000 and XP. I vaguely remember that the problem was related to the AGP GART driver. I'm not sure it would affect pure DOS though.

Reply 5 of 27, by precaud

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I just went into BIOS and changed "Halt on Errors" from "All" to "None", but it made no difference.

So, whatever errors are causing this, I'm thinking that XP must have more sophisticated error trapping than 98SE does, and certainly DOS does.

Reply 6 of 27, by canthearu

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Set motherboard frequency back to 100mhz. See if your problem goes away.

Drop in an officially compatible CPU. See if your problem goes away.

If either of these fixes it, you are probably SOL. Your motherboard doesn't, from the research I quickly did, seem to be designed for the CPU you are running on it.

Note that both DOS/Windows 98 don't really sue a proper idle loop, so what you would consider idling under DOS is really the CPU under full load.

Reply 7 of 27, by precaud

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canthearu wrote:

Set motherboard frequency back to 100mhz. See if your problem goes away.

Already did that. It does. But IMO that doesn't explain the cause, since XP isn't affected.

If either of these fixes it, you are probably SOL. Your motherboard doesn't, from the research I quickly did, seem to be designed for the CPU you are running on it.

This will then be the first P2B-F I've ever heard of that didn't work reliably at 133MHz.

Does 98SE set any timing constants from the bus freq present when it is installed?

Reply 8 of 27, by precaud

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The plot thickens...

I decided to try some 133MHz S370 coppermines in slotkets. Here's what I have to play with:
667MHz, 866MHz, and 1GHz 133MHz P3's.
Asus S370-D and Gigabyte GA-6R7PR slotkets, known from past experience to be 133MHz-compatible. Both are set up for auto FSB and cpu voltage detect.

All three cpu's POST'ed in both slotkets. The 866 and 1G hangs after testing memory, and before looking for a keypress to go into BIOS setup. They do this in both slotkets. So the slotkets are working the same.
The 667 workes fine in both slotkets. It has been running 98SE for over 1/2 an hour now without errors.

So... this is not just a 133MHz FSB problem, but using 133MHz bus with the faster cpus. Which, of course, is exactly what I want.

I already have ram set for 3-3-3-10 timing. The only remaining variable is to see if changing the wait state setting makes any difference.

Reply 9 of 27, by mothergoose729

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precaud wrote:
The plot thickens... […]
Show full quote

The plot thickens...

I decided to try some 133MHz S370 coppermines in slotkets. Here's what I have to play with:
667MHz, 866MHz, and 1GHz 133MHz P3's.
Asus S370-D and Gigabyte GA-6R7PR slotkets, known from past experience to be 133MHz-compatible. Both are set up for auto FSB and cpu voltage detect.

All three cpu's POST'ed in both slotkets. The 866 and 1G hangs after testing memory, and before looking for a keypress to go into BIOS setup. They do this in both slotkets. So the slotkets are working the same.
The 667 workes fine in both slotkets. It has been running 98SE for over 1/2 an hour now without errors.

So... this is not just a 133MHz FSB problem, but using 133MHz bus with the faster cpus. Which, of course, is exactly what I want.

I already have ram set for 3-3-3-10 timing. The only remaining variable is to see if changing the wait state setting makes any difference.

This seems not uncommon for slot 1 boards. Using a 100mhz fsb is probably just a better bet.

Reply 10 of 27, by precaud

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Yeah, I'm kinda resigning to that. Adding the wait state made no difference. Nothing else to adjust that I can think of. I have a 900Mhz system running on a Tyan S1830S, its been stable as can be for years, so I may have to be satisfied with that. It has one IO-intensive app that would benefit proportionally from the 133MHz bus, hence this effort...

Reply 11 of 27, by precaud

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WAIT !! We have a winner !!

I was looking at the P3-866. Its voltage rating is 1.75 V. And it hung before even go into BIOS setup. That did not make sense.

Then I recalled reading that the voltage reg chip in the P2B-F is settable in 0.1 (one-tenth) of a volt increments. Which rasies the question: With the slotket set for "auto voltage detect", what if it was being rounded down to 1.7, and the chip was being under-volted?

So I set the S370-D slotket for 1.8V, plugged it in, and voila! It booted up fine, and has been running 98SE stable ever since. Amazing what a tenth of a volt can do.

Next is to see what happens with the 1GHz P3 at 1.8V. It is rated at 1.7V, so this will be a mild overvolt. I assume that will not be problematical?

Last edited by precaud on 2019-08-03, 23:41. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 12 of 27, by mothergoose729

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precaud wrote:
WAIT !! We have a winner !! […]
Show full quote

WAIT !! We have a winner !!

I was looking at the P3-866. Its voltage rating is 1.75 V. And it hung before even go into BIOS setup. That did not make sense.

Then I recalled reading that the voltage reg chip in the P2B-F is settable in 0.1 (one-tenth) of a volt increments. Which rasies the question: With the slotket set for "auto voltage detect", what if it was be rounded down, and the chip was being under-volted?

So I set the S370-D slotket for 1.8V, plugged it in, and voila! It booted up fine, and has been running 98SE stable ever since. Amazing what a tenth of a volt can do.

Next is to see what happens with the 1GHz P3 at 1.8V. It is rated at 1.7V, so this will be a mild overvolt. I assume that will not be problematical?

Asus boards from that era are known to have a pretty significant vdroop. Setting it to 1.8v probably actually means the CPU is getting closer to 1.7v in reality. I don't know what the upper limit is for a p3, but even a 1.9v would only mean maybe a 10% increase power at the same clock speed. Typical power consumption of a p3 is pretty low anyway... maybe 35 watts at the most.

Reply 13 of 27, by precaud

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I recall reading something about droop, but I thought it came into play with too many memory sticks installed. But you're probably right.

The 1GHz/133 FCPGA cpu is a no go. It ID's the processor and then hangs. I bumped the cpu voltage up another notch on the slotket but that made no diff. So I'm going to be happy at 866 with the 133MHz bus.

Not bad for a 20-year-old mobo/cpu combo.

Reply 15 of 27, by precaud

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the_ultra_code wrote:

My question is, how much RAM are you using in the system, @precaud? 512MB? 1GB?

512 (2x256)

My intention was to use 1GB but some tests showed it wasn't needed.

Reply 16 of 27, by mothergoose729

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The P2B-F should take a 1.4ghz tualatin with a pin mod. Even at 100mhz FSB, it still quite fast. There is a seller on ebay that offers one with a slotket premodded, and specifically notes compatibility with that board.

Reply 19 of 27, by precaud

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Ah, ok, I see it. It's interesting.

Just wondering, why would this work in my setup at 1.4GHz, when S370 P3/133's in quality slotkets don't work higher than 866?

Today I'm going to run the program that supposedly would benefit time-wise from the faster FSB, and see how much faster it actually is.