Damn, apologies for bumping my own thread but I'd be happy to hear any suggestion as this is really annoying me. I get piss poor HDD performance and it's quite a bottleneck 🙁 I still can't get DMA to work with Win98, it keeps freezing on boot.

I have:
- Tried another 80pins IDE cable
- Kept only a single hard drive
- Tried two different SATA-PATA adapters, both working fine for DMA in other builds
- Reinstalled Win98 from scratch
- Installed VIA 4in1 (that includes bus master driver) 4.251a as it is the version I've found on archive.org on the old FIC support page for this motherboard
- If I set the UDMA mode in BIOS from Auto to Disabled, Win98 boots again and the DMA option is checked for both disks. If I uncheck it, I can set UDMA mode back to auto in BIOS and it boots fine as well. So I'm sure it's the source of the booting freeze.
- I'm running latest BIOS (1.13AB135)

I wanted to try an IDE HDD to rule out the adapters even if they work with other builds, but it's dead 🙁 and don't have another one.
On the archived FIC page, there's also a mention of what I understand may be 3rd party DMA drivers that could be supported : HighPoint XStore Pro 1.20, but the download links are down. Is that worth a try? Would anyone have a copy? Googling around didn't help much, only found dead links.

I'd really appreciate any help at this stage. Are people successfully running UDMA on a FIC-PA2010+? If so are they running VIA 4-in-1, and which version? In the past I also tried later versions of 4-in-1 with similar results.

Many thanks!

I had installed this board with a (fast) PATA drive at the onboard port once - no issues at all.
So I would suspect your PATA->SATA adaptors are the problem. Depending on the chip they use they might work in another system perfectly but not in this one.
To veryfy this there will be no way around testing with a PATA drive or a SATA drive on a PCI->SATA controller (older model with it´s own BIOS).

I owned a FIC PA2010+ based system from 1997 up until 2003. I remember that I had severe trouble getting UDMA modes to work in Windows 98 SE. I have a system report from 2001 which lists my drives as GENERIC IDE DISK TYPE 46 without any DMA transfer mode enabled (= PIO Mode).

A later report indicates that I got my UDMA-2 and UDMA-3 drives to work properly with a reinstallation of Windows 98 First Edition. No idea what could have caused that issue.

My system ran Win2K, so that might be a Win98 (98ME?) issue indeed.

A PCI-SATA controller running it´s own BIOS might have the best chance to work around this.

Thanks guys! So there may be an issue with 98SE and this board, somewhat good to hear I guess, and I really like the PCI-SATA idea, didn't even think of it! I'll get one and test. Thanks again 😀

I didn´t install many of those controllers back in the days, but a Promise SATA I (150) should be supported well under Win98.

majestyk wrote on 2021-01-29, 19:27:

My system ran Win2K, so that might be a Win98 (98ME?) issue indeed.

A PCI-SATA controller running it´s own BIOS might have the best chance to work around this.

Same problem with my PA2010+ (latest bios 1.13AB135), Pentium MMX 233 and Windows 98 SE, also with the latest unofficial Update Pack: UDMA does not work, after activating (IBM IDE 20 GB and Optical IDE drives) no more booting into Windows! But does not bother me, still fast enough.

Being forced to PIO4will cause some additional CPU overhead, but as long as it does not slow down the system too much, why not live with it.

This was a triumph, I'm making a note here, huge success!

Thanks for the tips guys. Got a Promise S150 TX4, it was absolutely painless to install, getting great 25-30 mbps read/write speeds instead of 5-6 before and the system just feels less sluggish. Really happy how it turned out!