Better off using a ide/sata adapter. Compat mode always hit and miss for me.

kolderman wrote on 2020-05-24, 06:52:

Better off using a ide/sata adapter. Compat mode always hit and miss for me.

That's the annoying bit, I've had this hardware running Win98 without issues, albeit 15 years ago.

Only thing that's changed since then is the drives (I was running an 80Gb IDE for 98 and a 160Gb IDE for XP).

philmac wrote on 2020-05-24, 06:55:

kolderman wrote on 2020-05-24, 06:52:

Better off using a ide/sata adapter. Compat mode always hit and miss for me.

That's the annoying bit, I've had this hardware running Win98 without issues, albeit 15 years ago.

Only thing that's changed since then is the drives (I was running an 80Gb IDE for 98 and a 160Gb IDE for XP).

Exactly as I said...hit and miss 😉

See if your drives allow a jumper to be added to enable SATA 1 speeds.

texterted wrote on 2020-05-24, 09:56:

See if your drives allow a jumper to be added to enable SATA 1 speeds.

I'm using an IDE drive for Win98, so that won't work. The SATA drive is for XP and I've disabled it anyways during troubleshooting.

I've found a fix in the File System Properties troubleshooting settings, been through them all and I've found that "Disable protected-mode hard disk interrupt handling" resolves the issue when ticked.

Windows 98 captures the Int13h interrupts and processes them with a 32-bit virtual driver. If your program is having intermittent disk access problems, you may want to turn off this functionality. The program may then handle the Intl3h interrupts. This usually results in slower hard disk access, but it may solve problems with certain programs.

Now the CD drive is showing up, and I'm not getting any controller issues.

It's also now shutting down cleanly (which it wasn't before) 😀

Glad you got it sorted, now for the fun!

Good Job philmac ! I am bookmarking this topic as the Win98 drive compatibilty issue comes up often

Horun wrote on 2020-05-24, 15:58:

Good Job philmac ! I am bookmarking this topic as the Win98 drive compatibilty issue comes up often

Yeah, it was a pig to get working.

The nVidia nForce drivers CD that came with the Shuttle had bundled copies for Win98/2000/XP. The 2000/XP drivers had their own storage driver for both the PATA and SATA controllers, but no such driver for Win98 (the nVidia guidance just says to use the standard Microsoft driver). I tried to update Win98 to use the Win2k nForce storage driver and got exactly the same issue - compatibility mode, no visible drives.

I've had compatibility mode issues before, with dodgy ribbon cables and drives using CS jumpers (instead of Master/Slave) but never something like this. All the literature I can find states that the setting I've turned on has a performance hit, but it looks like it isn't substantial from the speed everything loads up.

Think I'd forgotten how easy all this became from 2K onwards 😉

EDIT: Final update - after installing all of my games and old software, I thought I'd try enabling protected-mode hard disk interrupt handling and see what happens.

It's all working normally now with no updated drivers. Go figure...

For anyone else reading this post, root cause is the fact that the Shuttle board has both SATA and IDE controllers present, and Win98 doesn't recognize both. A couple of days after re-enabling everything, it started misbehaving again.

From another post on this forum:

NJRoadfan wrote on 2013-10-02, 13:50:

Technical Background: Intel ICH5 boards predate AHCI, so they normally present on the onboard SATA connectors as a 3rd IDE controller, but at a non-standard hardware address (nevermind that there is official IDE assignments for this setup, just not very supported) . Windows 2000/XP has no problem with this as its IDE driver supports non-standard resource assignments. Windows 98's driver only recongizes IDE devices at the traditional hardware addresses (1F0h/IRQ 14 and 170h/IRQ15). The BIOS legacy setting gives you the option to map in the SATA ports as either the primary or secondary IDE channel and disables the PATA channel normally used. You can't use all three channels in Windows 98 as a result.

It does work in DOS however, since the Int 13h routine in the BIOS supports the drive (so you can boot off of it in "Enhanced" mode). Thats why the Windows 98 install worked fine, but it locked up when starting Windows. Control was passed from Int 13h to Windows' protected mode driver and it chocked.

The AMD motherboard I'm using here also predates AHCI support for SATA (it only supports IDE or RAID), so I suspected that I might have a similar problem here.

I tried setting the IDE controller to "both channels enabled" and changed the SATA controller to "no channels enabled" within Win98 Device Manager (the SATA drives are NTFS so I can't read them in Win98 anyway). This completely fixed the issue and I've now got normal access. It doesn't affect booting into XP (all drives are visible).