VOGONS


First post, by fosterwj03

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I'm a bit stumped by this issue. Windows 2000 seems to run OK on my new (to me) Asus Prime H310-Plus motherboard with an i5-8400. My graphics card works in the x16 slot tied to the CPU and the OS sees the on-board PS/2 port (keyboard or mouse only), serial port, on-board network (if I can find a driver for it), and on-board audio. But, Windows 2000 fails to initialize PCIE-to-PCI bridges connected to the chipset's PCH regardless of if the bridge is on the motherboard (an Asmedia chip) or on a PCIE card in one of the x1 slots per my attached screen captures. PCIE bridges do work in the x16 slot connected to the CPU, so I think the issue comes from the PCH.

Windows 2000 see the bridges and appears to assign resources properly. Windows 2000 says that the BIOS doesn't provide enough information to initialize the bridges.

I tried to disable all of the PCH power management features which I read can cause bridge failures if the OS can't manage power reduction features, but that didn't change anything. I also tried several older versions of the UEFI/BIOS which also didn't seem to make any difference.

Windows 98, on the other hand, can initialize the bridges and the devices connected to them such as USB 2.0 controllers and my Sound Blaster Audigy.

Would anyone here at Vogon's know what might cause this error in Windows 2000? I have the same issue with Windows NT 3.51 also failing to initialize devices connected to the Asmedia bridge to the PCI slots (I suspect these errors are related). Is it possible that the board's UEFI/BIOS might have a setting that I've missed to fix this issue?

Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 10, by bakemono

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Out of curiosity, are you using Standard PC HAL, MPS, or ACPI?

GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage

Reply 2 of 10, by fosterwj03

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MPS. Asus has a good reputation with MPS support on newer boards. Windows 2000 initializes all 6 processor cores on this board. Unfortunately, the CPU won't turbo on its own, so I'm stuck with the 2.8GHz base clock for the time being.

Reply 3 of 10, by bakemono

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The problem could be related to MPS if it affects 2000 and NT but not 98. You might want to seek out the ACPI 2.0 driver that was posted on discord, and then try running 2000 with ACPI HAL instead.

GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage

Reply 4 of 10, by fosterwj03

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Nice, I hadn't seen the ACPI driver. I'll look for it.

Reply 5 of 10, by fosterwj03

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Although, I should mention that I prefer the Vanilla kernel when I use Windows 2000. I'd rather not use the Extended kernel (which the ACPI driver compiled for XP would require).

Reply 6 of 10, by fosterwj03

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I think I found the solution (or I should say workaround) for my PCI bridge issue. It turns out that initializing PCIe-to-PCI bridges is a common enough problem in various versions of NT-based Windows that Microsoft posted a KB article about it:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoo … pansion-chassis

This article didn't describe my case perfectly, but I figured I'd try the fix anyway. Here's what I did:

In "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PnP\Pci" of the registry I created the DWORD "HackFlags" per the KB. I then assigned it the hex value "600" since I didn't know the precise root cause. I closed regedit and rebooted.

On the next reboot, all of my PCI cards (Audigy, Realtek 8139 networking, and Via-based USB) got detected and started to work (pictured) through the Asmedia bridge chip.

I hope this helps anyone else trying to run vanilla Windows 2000 on a more modern platform with compatible MPS tables.

Oh, one other thing: does anyone here know of a program or driver other than ThrottleStop that will enable CPU Turbo modes on a Coffee Lake CPU? ThrottleStop 6.0 produces a "CPU Not Supported" error on my Coffee Lake System and newer versions don't work with Windows 2000.

Reply 7 of 10, by fosterwj03

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OK, so the story gets a little weirder. I reconfigured my setup yesterday to test Windows NT 3.51 on the H310 board, and Windows NT wouldn't boot. While not a big deal, I started to remove devices from the board to troubleshoot, including a NVMe drive for booting Windows 7. I couldn't get the system to boot Windows NT, so I gave up.

After reinstalling all of the devices for Windows 2000, the PCI bridge stopped working again. After troubleshooting for a good amount of time, I realized I had the NMVe drive installed the last time I ran Windows 2000. I reinstalled the NVMe drive to test my theory, and, sure enough, the PCI bridge started working again. I further tested the fix above by removing the registry entry. The system rebooted with a working PCI bridge. I guess the registry hack above didn't matter. It was the NVMe drive that fixed the issue.

That doesn't explain why Windows 2000 couldn't initialize the bridge without the NVMe port populated, but I guess I learned something interesting about this motherboard.

Reply 8 of 10, by Horun

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Nice ! Glad you sorta figured it out. Maybe the NVME with it's direct connect to pcie lanes triggered something behind the scene in the bios or chipset. ?
added: not related but I got a PCI Marvell Raid card working on my Z370 Pro4, was not the easiest thing to figure out but was actually just 2 simple bios settings that were not well documented....

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 9 of 10, by fosterwj03

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What were the settings if you recall what they were?

Reply 10 of 10, by Horun

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fosterwj03 wrote on 2025-03-25, 02:39:

What were the settings if you recall what they were?

From my notes in 2018 on the Marvell RAID/SATA adapter added to my z370 board:
"Update: After changing a few motherboard BIOS items on the Advanced -> BOOT page:
Full screen LOGO = Enabled, AddOn ROM display = Enabled
In CSM -> Launch Storage OpROM = Legacy Only (very important)
I was able to get into Marvell BIOS using Ctrl+M by doing a system restart and holding Ctrl while tapping M.
I did not see the pre BIOS screen saying to hit Ctrl+M but my monitor is slow to wake up (it goes to sleep during a restart)."

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun