If it has a 3.3/5V jumper on it, it likely needs to be set to 3.3V for DMA modes to work.

jmarsh wrote on 2020-02-01, 13:17:

If it has a 3.3/5V jumper on it, it likely needs to be set to 3.3V for DMA modes to work.

ill check that as soon as im done installing win98 on this other CF card I have.
edit: doesnt work with new CF or changing the jumper to 3.3v unfortunately

IIRC there's a bug with some Pentium BIOS and DMA mode. As there was only one DMA mode back then, anything else was considered "not DMA compatible". When DMA 2 HDDs came out, they were considered as not DMA compatible. To fix this issue, (if I'm correct about the nature of that issue) you need to patch your BIOS.

Just in case, have you tried to install ALi's chipset drivers ?

Deksor wrote on 2020-02-01, 14:48:

IIRC there's a bug with some Pentium BIOS and DMA mode. As there was only one DMA mode back then, anything else was considered "not DMA compatible". When DMA 2 HDDs came out, they were considered as not DMA compatible. To fix this issue, (if I'm correct about the nature of that issue) you need to patch your BIOS.

Just in case, have you tried to install ALi's chipset drivers ?

I havent installed anything but in the system properties it does say im using ALi M5229 as the hard disk controller. DMA also works with the original HDD this thing came with but I guess that would relate to what you said about DMA 2 perhaps. err well I guess I'll try updating the bios. Also where would I even get the chipset drivers? I thought these might work but the link seems to be dead http://www.biostar-usa.com/downloaddetails.asp?fileid=101

edit: I tried updating the bios with the m5atc bios linked at wims.rainbow-software but i just ended up getting this error https://imgur.com/a/nW2rjUm not sure what else to try. I guess I'll try and find those ALi chipset drivers next.

If you're absolutely sure this is the right bios (be careful because if it's not you'll end up bricking your board, which is recoverable you'll need a EPROM programmer), use a software named uniflash which you can get here : http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=19455
As for the driver, this should be the right one :

Thanks for the links. Unfortunately I ran into this when running the setup https://imgur.com/a/G05B0aJ. Any way I'm 100% sure I have an M5ATC. It's printed on the motherboard. Its more a matter of should I really trust this bios image I randomly found on wims. It's patched so you can use larger HDDs. Not sure if it would actually do anything for this DMA stuff. I was kinda just going for it and crossing my fingers it would fix it. If any one has an opinion on using a bios image from wims let me know. Oh yea I probably should have mentioned this earlier but I have a 6x86mx. I dunno if that's really relative or not but I thought I should clarify since you mentioned a Pentium bug earlier.

I have got two M5ATC motherboards. They did not produce this error with a regular HDD.
Jan Steunebrink has made a custom BIOS adding support for 128GB HDDs and K6-III(+) as well as K6-2+ CPUs. He's looking for testers right now, I tried the BIOS without issues. Try asking him for the image, maybe it'll fix your problem. His website is http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

yea when I use the HDD that came with the machine DMA works fine. I'll try emailing Jan about testing out the image though. thanks for the suggestion.

Hope it helps! 👍

BTW as far as I can tell he's quite happy getting feedback about possible bugs. If DMA still can't be enabled on the CF card he'd probably be interested in finding out why.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-02-01, 17:57:

Hope it helps! 👍

BTW as far as I can tell he's quite happy getting feedback about possible bugs. If DMA still can't be enabled on the CF card he'd probably be interested in finding out why.

do you happen to know where I can get my hands on the official bios as well? you know just in case or whatever.

I'll have a look what I had downloaded for the boards. I think I had found the latest official BIOS.

Ok, this archive should contain the latest BIOS ATC0811b.
There are two files included, the binary image (atc0811b.bin) and an executable that I'm not really sure what it did anymore. Maybe it's a complete flash tool or simply a self extracting archive? You know how to use UniFlash so the .bin should be what you want anyway.

I got this either from elhvb.com or used web.archive.org to download it from an old image of Biostar's website. If you ever need an old BIOS or documentation on a board those are great sources.

Good luck and have fun! :-)

word ill bookmark those. tyvm.

I was wondering if I could totally circumvent this problem with a pci ide controller? Not totally sure if this is a foolish idea and it has more to do with the mobo firmware and not the controller itself.

Maybe with something like this https://www.amazon.com/PROMISE-TECHNOLOGY-ULT … coding=UTF8&me=

Another IDE controller may very well fix the problem. But since we haven't really determined the cause yet this is a guessing game. If you want to take chance pay attention to buy a controller with its own BIOS EEPROM. Otherwise you'll have a hard time booting from it.

So it seems like you can boot from those just fine but apparently you can't use an optical drive with it under dos. Which is a bummer and not very ideal. Unless you can just leave your optical on the mobos IDE controller and the HDD on the PCI controller but that sounds like a potential nightmare to me.

So the weirdest thing just happened. I went into my bios and disabled UDMA just for the hell of it. When I went back into windows and checked the drive in device manager the DMA box was checked. uhh wtf? so I did a HDD benchmark test and the speeds are better but didnt get to 33mb like I would expect but whatever... so wtf just happened? 🤣... Before it wouldnt go past 10MB and it went up to 14MB this time. So its an improvement but probably not the speeds I should be getting.

https://imgur.com/a/t8SjiMS

Well I think this is one of the symptoms of the bug. I can't remember where I saw that, but it was probably on one of these BIOS modding websites.

alright got another update. I finally updated the BIOS. I dunno why i put it off so long. Anyway, I used the image Doornkaat linked. Once the flash was over I went into the BIOS and set every thing to default which sets the UMDA settings to AUTO. Went into windows and the DMA checkbox stayed checked. Alright so some progress at least 🤣. Tested the speeds and again maxed out at 14MB. So I went back into the BIOS and set it to UDMA 2 and got "memory test failed". I think my gotek thought a floppy was in the drive when it wasnt and was causing some issues. Anyway hard shut down the machine and it booted to windows and DMA is checked. oh baby moment of truth. Ran another HDD speed test and got a max read of 14MB again. Shouldnt I be pushing like 25-30MB? Should I just be happy with this and let it go already?