First post, by walterg74
Hi folks,
Wondering if you could help out/recommend regarding this...
I'm putting together a Pentium 1 build, where the base is a Pentium 233 MMX CPU and 32MB RAM.
I was using a Viper V330 PCI card (Riva 128), and I have a floppy emulator and an IDE/CF Adapter.
Initially all went well, I partitioned the card (2GB FAT, 2GB FAT32, 11ish GB FAT32), had only 1st partition active, installed DOS, Win 3.1, etc.
I tried Duke Nukem 3D, just to give it a test, and I was surprised to see it constantly crashed with errors, not even starting. Tested a few more games (Quake and Screamer), and the same, issues and crash back to DOS.
Now, at the time I put this issue aside, blaming it on dubious versions of the games, etc, and focused on installing Windows 98SE.
Made the FAT32 partition active (hiding de FAT16 one), had all the files on the large partition, boot from Windows 98 floppy and launched setup.
After copying initial files and actually starting the install process, it always crashed... giving out different/numerous of the "classical" windows errors one reads about...
Now, although it usually does not happen, I realize I may be being hit by two issues at the same time, because the video card:
- Sometimes on boot I saw it reported correctly as 4MB, but others as 2MB
- I started testing out on other machinesm but now no machine boots with this card inserted, getting beeps/errors of no card found
- Had given tons of errors with VMT, (when it still booted) but I did not know if it was a product of incorrectly running VMT without clena boot or what)
In any case, I am ruling out video now, because since this card doe snot even boot now, I am retesting with a Number 9 S3 968 Vision card I have, which is booting/working fine (at least first glance).
However, testing out the DOS games again, still crashes.
I am initially ruling out RAM, because I had already ran memtest on it and it passed with no errors. However, just to double check, I am running it again as I write this.
Given that for now all signs would point to either a faulty motherboard(?) or CPU(?).....
- Is there any tool/prog to actually test if the CPU has any errors?
- Has anyone run across something like this before?
- Any recommendations on other tests I can do to try to find the culprit and get a fully working system?
While we're at it, since my idela card for this build was the Viper V330 and it's frired... Any recommendations for a card for this Pentium MMX 233 build...? (I will also be putting a Diamond Monster 3D card in it)
Thanks