Have you applied the F4c(Beta) BIOS update? This increases Max HDD to 75GB well above your 40GB, I'm just not sure what earlier bios was limited at.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-6BXC/ … support-dl-bios

I would expect it to support 40GB drive which you say it does.
I think it may be the SATA-IDE adapter though and your Mandrake troubleshooting is more or less correct what the issue is.
NT based OS's are alot more sensitive where you install them vs Win9x so if they aren't happy can see NT saying "hell no"

Only other thing is what did you use to partition the drive? I've had best results in using Fdisk or the built in option in Windows setup.
3rd party tools can sometimes do something "fancy" that confuses or isnt supported by the OS.

Thanks! I'll be sure to try that tomorrow. So I actually used a few things over the course of trying to get the computer working. First I used the partition tool off some old Ubuntu CD to wipe an old Windows 7 x64 install off the drive. I think I formatted it as FAT? Then I tried to install Windows XP, and I'm pretty sure I reformatted the drive in the setup to be NTFS. I tried a couple more times using XP and Neptune's setups to install and reformat the drive but still had the same problems. When I installed Windows ME I used FDisk because I had to wipe Linux partitions away after trying to install Mandrake. After that it's just been FDisk some more and also whatever NT's setup uses.

Welp, the BIOS update did not solve the issue. I guess it's just my SATA to IDE adapter then. I'll stick to ME for now I guess until I can figure out a storage solution.

Hi, you can try a 40pin ATAPI cable.
Some BIOSes will use slower transfer modes if they detect a 40pin cable.
It's just a random idea.

If that doesn't work, check the CMOS Setup and use slower modes.
No block mode, no 32-Bit transfers, use ISA IDE mode, try PIO lower than 4 (PIO 4 was buggy), disable multi-word DMA, try to connect the IDE drive to a different IDE channel (disable secondary IDE channel if not needed) try PNP OS=No, etc.

Good luck! 👍

Run memtest as many times bad/marginal memory can cause this effect too. 9x runs fine NT crashes all over the place.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-08-20, 18:57:

Hi, you can try a 40pin ATAPI cable. Some BIOSes will use slower transfer modes if they detect a 40pin cable. It's just a random […]
Show full quote

Hi, you can try a 40pin ATAPI cable.
Some BIOSes will use slower transfer modes if they detect a 40pin cable.
It's just a random idea.

If that doesn't work, check the CMOS Setup and use slower modes.
No block mode, no 32-Bit transfers, use ISA IDE mode, try PIO lower than 4 (PIO 4 was buggy), disable multi-word DMA, try to connect the IDE drive to a different IDE channel (disable secondary IDE channel if not needed) try PNP OS=No, etc.

Good luck! 👍

I've also seen issues with UltraDMA through SATA adapters. As you don't mention UltraDMA explicitly I'd point that out too as something to disable. I can't explain why it wouldn't only affect NT and Linux OSes though leaving 9x ok. Perhaps just different ways of calling int13h?
You could also consider getting one of those SIL PCI SATA cards and use SATA drives. Audio CDs would be the only downside I think.

Hi! From what I remember, Win9x does not use DMA by default.
It needs to be enabled manually in device manager, if memory serves.
I'm speaking under correction, though. 😅

Jo22 wrote on 2020-08-20, 20:20:

Hi! From what I remember, Win9x does not use DMA by default.
It needs to be enabled manually in device manager, if memory serves.
I'm speaking under correction, though. 😅

Yeah, but these failures are happening early enough that all three OSes are still going through the BIOS. it could be some weird old-style int13h vs. int13h extensions issue or something.

OP, you could try going super old-school - if you format a floppy from an NT-based OS and copy c:\ntldr and c:\boot.ini to it, you can boot from it. It loads ntldr from the floppy and then loads the kernel and everything else from the hard drive.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-08-20, 20:31:

Jo22 wrote on 2020-08-20, 20:20:

Hi! From what I remember, Win9x does not use DMA by default.
It needs to be enabled manually in device manager, if memory serves.
I'm speaking under correction, though. 😅

Yeah, but these failures are happening early enough that all three OSes are still going through the BIOS. it could be some weird old-style int13h vs. int13h extensions issue or something.

The graphical portion of Windows 9x initially uses a miniature version of Windows 3.1x, also known as "mini.cab".
At some point quickly after, Windows 9x takes over. The different window decorations and buttons (Win 3.x=rounded, Win9x=boxy) make it easy to distinquish.
Both the Windows textmode installers and mini.cab use MS-DOS, more precisely SmartDrive, to access the disk.
Windows NT and the NTOS boot loader pretty much avoid using BIOS altogether.
They use their native drivers to access the disk and to query drive geometry (LBA).

If win9x installs and runs OK, but NT-based windows fails the first reboot, just try to do a "fdisk /mbr" to the disk. For whatever reason, Windows setup on NT 4.0, 2000 and XP does not do that and if the disk had another OS previously, it fails to boot.

On Windows NT's setup console (recovery console), the commands are fixboot and fixmbr, I believe.

Thanks for the great suggestions everyone! I do have another IDE cable which came with the motherboard. I imagine it's a 40-pin one since it was a freebie. I just put the hard drive on that cable and moved the DVD drive over to the secondary IDE channel. Now XP works!
Memtest was actually one of the first things I tried, and fortunately my RAM is fine.
Fixboot and fixmbr didn't fix anything when I tried it in the past.