Not just SATA hard drives, but also SATA SSDs.

I only use SSDs if possible.

I have tried ans it got stuck on detecting plugnplay devices. Im teying another hdd .but this ine is 250.
I created a partition fat32 with smartfsd .

This is on Wme. For me 98se has been very unreliable with most of my hardware

You might need to get a Promise S150 PCI SATA controller because they have Win9x drivers. The early VIA SATA controllers were very, very, very, very buggy. Chances are that it will not work properly with that large of a drive... or even detect it at all.

It is a socket 754 system so I would think that that onboard controller would work ok, but who knows.

I think it should work just fine given your board uses VT8237R (The VT8237 series should be mature enough). It's just you need to look for some patches if you intend to use SSDs larger than 120/128GB due to the 137GB(128GiB) limitation of the original Win9x 32-bit disk driver.

What a coincidence! I just inherited an MSI K8MM-V and was trying to decide if it's worth keeping. I will be quite interested to hear the results of your build.

As LSS10999 already mentioned, Win9x has a limit of around 127 or 128 GB. Most of my Win98SE systems use either 80GB or 120GB IDE drives. I've experienced no problems with them.

I've had mixed results with SATA and Win9x. One build of mine is an ABIT KT7A with a SYBA SD-SATA150R and 80GB drive running Win98SE. I haven't touched that machine in a few years now, but I don't remember having any problems with it.

Another PC that I built for my brother is an MSI KM4M-V with onboard SATA controller and a 20GB IDE hard drive running Win98SE. For some reason, when the SATA controller is enabled in that PC, Star Wars Rogue Squadron stutters badly. Everything is fine with the SATA disabled in hardware manager. Weird.

well in the 80gb sata partitioned with smart fdisk (hirens boot disk) it gets stuck at plugnplay but it continues the install after a while.

on the 250 with only a a 30gb partition it gets stuck at plugnplay and it never continues.

im going to get a 80 or 120 desktop hdd so i can have it permanent (the sata hdds i used are laptop drives)

On a 40gb Ide drive , this motherboard is very very stable on winme, im even finishing deus ex on the voodoo 3.

Very interesting! I recently finished Deus Ex myself. Despite having several V1, V2, V3, and V5 Win9x machines at my disposal, I chose to play it under WinXP SP3 using the Deus Exe mod with these specs:

PC Chips M861G v1.6a motherboard
Athlon 64 3400+ Venice S754
1GB (2x512) RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6 6800 GT
SB Audigy 2 ZS

On my LCD monitor at 75hz, max FSAA etc, I consistently got 75 FPS, except for when I first met with Helios. The poisonous green fog at the base of its "pedestal" caused dips into the 30s.

I was trying to compromise between keeping the game original vs getting maximum performance with some 3rd-party bug fixes. At one point, I did try running it in GLIDE mode but I couldn't tolerate the jaggies. Back in the day, jaggies didn't bother me. 20 years later and they really bother my eyes. So, 6800 GT it was with FSAA maxed out.

Some games are still OK without FSAA. Others, such as Deus Ex, benefit greatly from it.

By the way, there shouldn't be a difference between 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives. If you're having problems with 2.5" drives, you'll probably have similar problems with 3.5" drives. Make sure you're using drives with 512B sectors. Most modern drives use 4K sectors and may cause problems. Try partitioning them using the original DOS FDISK included with Win9x. When it comes time to choose a size, use a percentage rather than a whole number. For example, on a 250GB drive, choose "25%" for a 62.5GB partition. Then wait... and wait... and wait...

A few years back, I wrote a Win98SE setup guide and posted it here:

Generic Win98SE Installation & Setup Guide

cyclone3d wrote:

You might need to get a Promise S150 PCI SATA controller because they have Win9x drivers. The early VIA SATA controllers were very, very, very, very buggy. Chances are that it will not work properly with that large of a drive... or even detect it at all.

That motherboard often came with a chipset that had a buggy SATA implementation which had trouble reading anything that was SATA2. This problem was reverted with the southbridge that uses the VT8237R Plus instead of the regular VT8237R. I always tried to make sure I got one with a Plus southbridge as these would at least see the SATA 2 drives 😀

I have been running a 64gb ssd with a startech ide to sata adapter. It lets me use dma in win 98se. YMMV

Make sure to fdisk /mbr and format fat32

Did not benchmark it yet.

How are resources when using a sata pci card? I do have some chinese knock off ide and sata pci card that says its a promise card.

I'll put up with jaggies any day over vaseline smeared all over my screen (FSAA or really ANY anti-aliasing option). I don't run anti-aliasing on any games old or new I much prefer the image to be crisp. I used to run AA all the time until I really started to notice how blurry any form of it actually makes the screen, then I couldn't take it anymore.