win98SE cdrom DMA checked despite no mobo support \ VOGONS

win98SE cdrom DMA checked despite no mobo support

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First post, by kegepet

Posted on 2019-10-05, 03:46

kegepet Offline

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I have an intel pd440fx (slot1) motherboard with win98se installed. I also use a sd to ide adapter. Whenever I check DMA for the adapter, i start having all kinds of problems--blue screens, failed write operations, and so on. I noticed, however, that my cdrom drive has DMA checked in device manager and seems to have no issues whatsoever. Now the 440fx chipset does not support UltraDMA, but I have not been able to determine if it supports any kind of dma for storage devices. Also, I see no mention of DMA at all in the BIOS. How did the cdrom drive get its DMA checkbox checked? Should i uncheck it? Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 5, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2019-10-05, 05:26

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If it is working correctly don't change anything.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 2 of 5, by Doornkaat

Posted on 2019-10-05, 06:22

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The 440FX supports DMA.
Your CD drive probably does as well.
Your SD->IDE adaptor might not.
Also SD cards usually don't have a write cache. In order to optimise disc writes Win98 collects small amounts of data and sends them to the drive as a small burst. Without the write cache this can cause short system freezes amongst other problems.
In order to avoid this you might try deactivating this feature in Windows and reenabling DMA on the SD card to see if the problem persists.

Reply 3 of 5, by kegepet

Posted on 2019-10-05, 07:33

kegepet Offline

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And how might I disable this feature. What's the feature called? Thanks for your help.

Reply 4 of 5, by Doornkaat

Posted on 2019-10-05, 09:22

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I believe it's called write-behind caching.
Sorry, I'm not using an English version of Win98 so I have to guess a bit:
Open System from Control Panel, select the Performance tab, select File System select your fixed SD card there and disable the option for write behind caching on fixed drives.
I hope this helps. 😀

Reply 5 of 5, by kegepet

Posted on 2019-10-09, 05:52

kegepet Offline

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Sorry for taking so long to get back. I tried your suggestion--no luck. I also tried different bus mastering drivers besides the ones included with windows 98. Specifically, the triones drivers. But sadly, that did not work either. This must just be a compatibility issue with the sintechi sd ide adapter and the piix3 on my 440fx. Perhaps the sintechi only supports udma and not the older, slower versions. If anyone can confirm, that would be helpful.

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