In the last episode I had resolved to rebuilding my 2nd generation system based on the AthlonXP 2000+ CPU and Asus A7V-133C motherboard that I still owned.
I'd like to report that it was smooth sailing from this point out but I was struggling to get any installers to load. Windows 98 would just hang loading it's setup program. I tried Windows XP, Debian and even NetBSD with similar levels of success. The only thing I could get installed and working was FreeDOS, which gave me a leg-up to try running installers from a booted system but that lead nowhere but a different set of errors like Windows 98 would now complain I had less than 16MB RAM and refused to install.
I figured there was hardware problems afoot, I saw drives disappear sometimes and I went down the rabbit hole trying to rule out issues with the IDE cables, the IDE controller itself but to cut a long story short, I got round to running memtest86 and it was a mess. I took a 50/50 chance and pulled one of the two remaining DIMMs and the errors disappeared! Switched the RAM again and the PC wouldn't even POST with just the faulty RAM so of the three I started with only one continues to work.
Now down to 256MB, I retried installing Windows 98 and it worked first time. I had decided to take a look at a project I read about a few months earlier called Win98quickinstall (github).
Win98 quick install provides a streamlined method of installing Windows 98 (duh!) via some custom disc images they provide on their Github page. I couldn't get the DVD images to boot but the CD image installed fine (ignoring some annoying partitioning matters I'll gloss over). I now had a working Windows 98 system installed, quick! A capability that turned out to come in useful later on.
Turns out the micro image on CD is very bare bones, it provides about the most minimalist Windows 98 system you can get away with. It doesn't even come with any wallpapers but I suppose you can add them yourself later.
I got to installing drivers for my hardware which included the Riva TNT2, a Sound Blaster Live!, a USB 2.0 controller and a 3com NIC. I then tried installing some USB drivers called nusb36e.exe which supposedly provide more modern USB storage support but I'll never know because every time I installed it explorer.exe would crash on start up leaving me with no desktop, even in safe mode, and only a Windows reinstall would resolve the problem (told you quick install would come in useful!).
I now had what could be called a working 2001-era Windows 98 system but things weren't going to stop there because after a lot of poking and head scratching I finally managed to get the Pentium II motherboard working! It seems the board has a faulty PS_ON (wikipedia) circuit so cannot activate the PSU from the power switch, however I found I was able to get it to power on by enabling keyboard start-up, or, as I later discovered, by shorting the SMI (wikipedia) header. After this I decided not to return it and to look into fixing the PS_ON issue later but for now I can use the motherboard as I originally intended.