It ran perfectly happily for years, then decided that it wouldn't boot any more.
It gets most of the way through then generates a STOP which disappears so fast I can't read it.
Tried reinstalling on a different drive but that fails part way through too.
Runs Win 98SE ok.
Ho hum.
Installs ok on another pc but I don't have Win2k drivers for that.
The only thing it's used for is driving a printer/scanner.
What make & model of Printer/Scanner? Likely works on Linux Mint unless a "Win GDI" printer, which is unlikely as it's got a scanner.
Parallel, SCSI , Ethernet, or USB. The USB printer/scanners in W2K era were deadly slow, so for years we only sold SCSI scanners. I had an Epson Perfection 1200 SCSI scanner since 2000 and it worked on NT 4.0, XP and Linux. Passed it and a Linux workstation on to my son this year.
Is BIOS battery & settings OK?
Odd, innit?
No progress on the original problem, so just to create more I powered up a rather more modern (10 year old) Win2k box.
Naturally enough as dead as the proverbial dodo.
Noticed the rather dubious looking capacitors next to the processor, so glued some 1000uF 25V 85 deg caps under the MB.
And lo! it sprang back to life again.
Which was good.
The Really Ancient (bits are from about 1990 IIRC, other bits are later) 586 Win3.1 box that sits next to it came back to life without much fuss.
I had thought this was the box that originally drove the scanner, but it appears not.
It does drive the equally ancient Needham electronics eprom programmer.
At least I can now have a look at the NTFS drive that's giving trouble, though whether or not that's an advantage is currently moot.
Well the 1990 box VGA died today. Not the monitor, tested by substitution. Not the VESA bus VGA card: ditto. Swapped the slot: ditto.
Box still boots: tested this by fitting a mono card & mono monitor (remember those?).
There's an EGA monitor in the garage but I don't think I'll bother dragging it up.
Can't find VGA ISA card.
I gave up then working on the long standing principle that once stuff starts going wrong it's time to leave it for another day.
Doesn't always work when you're dealing with odd hardware but it may be worth trying the older OS in VM. I use Virtualbox to run XP under Linux. Works perfectly with software that won't run under Linux (or W7 and W10 for that matter). I doubt it would allow virtualised W98 direct access to hardware. I have an old P2 machine with ISA slots and parallel ports for that.