First post, by LSS10999
I'm trying to run Windows ME on an ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe motherboard. So far with rloew's patches I'm able to install it without encountering any major issue. Haven't installed any other driver yet, but the system in its current state is stable and fast.
However, I'm hitting a wall on getting its onboard IDE port, which is powered by Marvell 88SE6121, usable on Win9x. I don't really have any IDE hard drives -- the port was exclusively used by an IDE DVD-RW drive as only IDE optical drives have the CD audio connector that I need to connect between the drive and sound card. All my SSDs are connected via SATA, which works fine after necessary patching.
Due to the nature of the IDE port, most DOS CD TSRs can't see the IDE optical drive and would refuse to load, including OAKCDROM from Win9x CD's boot image (as such I had to copy the WinME install files from the install CD to the hard disk with the help of a Linux distro), despite I could boot from the optical drive. But from what I could remember, FreeDOS appears to be able to see it via one of the drivers it has... I was able to install at least FreeDOS T2303 and its bonus CD just fine, without any external assistance (should apply to other test builds also).
The disk controller doesn't appear to have any driver meant for earlier OSes such as 9x. Only drivers for XP and later are available... I wonder if there are ways to get these external controllers working somehow...