Was that P3-500 the original CPU for the board? If not it could well be a CPU vs BIOS thing. BIOS update would be the way to go, even if it's scary on these soldered things.

Make sure to put the BIOS on a hard drive with raw DOS and no memory managers. Also be sure it's small enough to be well below any limits. Do that and the built-in error checking of the Intel flash procedure should be safe enough.

As for the HDDs/SDDs, not sure. Are you confident the 40GB disk really is working correctly, and not just reporting full size & usability, but potentially wrapping round over 32GB?

The board was sold separately, without CPU. CPU support list indicates PIII support with version P02 or later. To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure if I have P01 or P02 currently on the board. Anyway, I have PII 350 at hand which is definitely supported in all bios versions - I'll try that.

Good catch regarding the HDD size - I'll test it.

havli wrote on 2024-10-23, 12:39:

The board was sold separately, without CPU. CPU support list indicates PIII support with version P02 or later. To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure if I have P01 or P02 currently on the board. Anyway, I have PII 350 at hand which is definitely supported in all bios versions - I'll try that.

Good catch regarding the HDD size - I'll test it.

You may want to consider sticking with BIOS version P06:
Intel-built 486/Pentium/PPro/PII motherboard guide

In regards to running coppermine Pentium III Processors on this board. With any BIOS newer then Version P06 you will get this message at boot:
"Warning : This motherboard is not compatible with this processor's voltage requirements. The system has been halted." etc.
P10 is the latest BIOS.

I also have this SR440BX. And plenty of documentation for it. Unfortunately no official remark regarding the maximum supported HDD size...

Found this topic, about a similar motherboard:
Intel SE440BX-2 P13 BIOS Maximum HDD Size?

Try getting a POST card to see which part of the POST takes a long time.

havli wrote on 2024-10-23, 09:56:

Hello everyone :) […]
Show full quote

Hello everyone 😀

I recently bought this nice board. It is i440BX chipset in microATX form - and the most interesting part, it has onboard Riva TNT with 16MB SDRAM. I intend to built retro PC for windows98 gaming and some late DOS games too. The configuration is:

Pentium III 500 (Katmai)
1x 128 MB RAM
Onboard Riva TNT
Voodoo2 SLI
ESS 1869
20GB IDE HDD
DVD drive

Everything runs well enough after initial testing. There is one small catch. On a warm reboot (either restart command from w98 or ctrl+alt+del) the POST takes very long time. It hangs at the basic screen where CPU model is shown, storage devices, etc. It just sits there for 1-2 minutes and nothing is happening. After this time runs out the board just beeps and proceeds with booting the OS and everything runs nicely.

It behaves like this on most warm reboots but not all of them, maybe 80% are slow. When I turn the machine of and on again, then it always POSTs normally (like 5 seconds). When I press the reset button, it also POSTs normally.

I suspect the problem might be BIOS version. Seems to be the very first release for this board. Do you have similar experience with Intel made boards of this era? Any idea if new BIOS could fix it? I can flash later bios of course but it is a bit risky business because the flash chip is soldered on this board and it isn't the usual PLCC package but rather something else, much harder to solder in case anything goes wrong. I also tried disabling all non-essential devices like COM ports, LPT, Floppy controller... but this makes no difference. Also removing the PCI and ISA devices makes no difference.

And another question - what are the HDD size limits on these Intel boards? The bios is from January 1999. I know boards from this era usually have the limit at 32GB and when patched, can go up to 127 GB or so. But here when I connected 120GB SSD (through IDE-SATA adapter) the BIOS detected 64GB size... which is new to me 😀 The limit most likely isn't 32GB because 40GB HDD can use the whole capacity.

Thanks 😀

I’ve had some experience with older Intel boards, and it does sound like the BIOS could be causing those long warm reboot times. Updating the BIOS might help, but I understand your concern about the soldered chip.

Good idea with POST card. I will try that. It seems the wait time is just before the IDE drives are detected.

Anyway, in the meantime I performed some tests. The original BIOS version was P02 (so with PIII support). Switching to PII 350 did nothing. I also decided to flash the BIOS P06, just to be sure it is not the issue. Flashing process went smoothly 😀 Unfortunately no change regarding the POST hang.

As for the storage size. 120GB SSD is still recognized as 64GB in the BIOS (even in the P06). Windows98 fdisk detect is as 48GB. I am aware of the quirks regarding this version of fdisk and large drives... but usually it behaves diffeently. Anyway - I created 4GB partition for the OS and the rest for the data. After installation the data partition is seen like 102GB. A pleasant surprise, no complaints here 😁