jmarsh wrote on 2026-07-13, 17:59:

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-13, 15:04:

There really is no reason to have to format a drive on the computer it is going to be used on unless the drive geometry is detected differently or improperly on the computer it is going to be used on.

And that's exactly why you shouldn't do it. If the partition is created using the wrong geometry it won't have a hope of working correctly. Especially a VM, I would not trust at all to use the correct translation.

LBA is LBA is LBA. I've never run into an instance where a proper BIOS has seen a drive differently than any other BIOS supporting LBA.

The main issue is with SSDs, the old OS will not align the sectors properly if that is needed and this will cause more wear on the drive.

And if installing Windows 9x / ME, it will not partition properly either.

I guess you could use a different boot OS to do the partitioning and formatting, but I have not had to do that and have never had an issue with a drive that I partitioned and/or formatted on a different computer.

So my card has two ams1117 regulators, one 3.3 and one 1.8. All the electrolytic caps are 15v 47uf, but they look TINY, even for a 10uf! I noticed the pucture of the sil3114 posted earlier has NO electrolytics..

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-13, 21:23:

LBA is LBA is LBA. I've never run into an instance where a proper BIOS has seen a drive differently than any other BIOS supporting LBA.

We're not talking about a "proper BIOS" here. Refer to your first post to this thread.

The card obviously has an issue writing to certain parts of the drive, which reeks of a translation issue. And since we're talking DOS programs, that's int13 access - using C/H/S with translation done by the card's BIOS, not direct LBA access.

Well i tried some power filtering no luck, next i used fdisk in small drive mode it made a 2 gig partion and format still locked up, all though it did write the fat table first.

Same issues with both cards running different firmwares. When I get a chance im going to try to run the xp set up and see if i have the same issues. Hopefully when the ide to sata comes it will let me install 98. The whole purpose of this PC is to run 98 and 9x dev tools along with some games.

i never updated my sil3112 and i switch off onboard disk controller when used. no problems for me. The chip was implemented on many cheap nameless cards and as result they had a lot of bios updates but I recommend to anyone don't bother updating bios unless its truly needed first after an initial test.

rwGast wrote on 2026-07-14, 02:58:

Well i tried some power filtering no luck, next i used fdisk in small drive mode it made a 2 gig partion and format still locked up, all though it did write the fat table first.

Same issues with both cards running different firmwares. When I get a chance im going to try to run the xp set up and see if i have the same issues. Hopefully when the ide to sata comes it will let me install 98. The whole purpose of this PC is to run 98 and 9x dev tools along with some games.

If possible, I would replace one of the 0.1 µF SMD capacitors with something with a capacitance of 1-10 µF.
For 1.8V, this could be any capacitor from any motherboard or graphics card.

And, if possible, I'd test the controller on something different and more modern.
For example, Socket AM3/+ or LGA775.
And with a SATA1 HDD, just in case.
After all, this controller is from a different era.
And the SSD technology itself is from a time after the controller.

You can also try updating your SSD firmware (by the way, what is it?).

jmarsh wrote on 2026-07-13, 20:56:

rwGast wrote on 2026-07-13, 20:21:

I do not have the option to format it there, format freezes at writing fat table... so formating the ssd is not an option at least with the sil3112 card

I'm not sure why you expect everything else to work ok when formatting doesn't...

This, if format doesn't finish there is no point trying anything else. It's certain to fail eventually.

It is a sandisk x110 64gb, I ordered off ebay. The ssd works fine on modern computers and works fine behind a usb2 adapter. Maybe the issue is the the ssd and the sil3112 just dont get along.

jmarsh wrote on 2026-07-14, 01:02:

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-13, 21:23:

LBA is LBA is LBA. I've never run into an instance where a proper BIOS has seen a drive differently than any other BIOS supporting LBA.

We're not talking about a "proper BIOS" here. Refer to your first post to this thread.

The card obviously has an issue writing to certain parts of the drive, which reeks of a translation issue. And since we're talking DOS programs, that's int13 access - using C/H/S with translation done by the card's BIOS, not direct LBA access.

I know we are talking about SIL based cards. Still, on a non-RAID card BIOS, it shouldn't matter if the drive is partitioned and formatted on a different computer. It should work fine.

Let's not forget drive cloning machines and pre-imaging hdds and SSDs for that matter. It works and continues to work. It doesn't have to be the exact machine being used with that drive for those cloned and pre-imaged drives to work properly.

Again, SIL controllers have had these types of issues even when they were on contemporary motherboards and expansion cards.

Go look back at reviews of motherboard that had these SIL controllers integrated.

You will notice the common theme of them being trash and causing all kinds of different issues and the recommendation being to disable them and not use them.

And still, motherboard mfgs continued to use them for quite a while.

Only recently have these controllers started to be recommended again and it blows my mind that everybody just seems to have completely forgotten what pieces of trash they have been since they were originally released.

Yes, sometimes they work, but it is not worth the headache and wasted hours upon hours trying to troubleshoot a fundamentally flawed piece of hardware that is more likely than not going to corrupt data.

rwGast wrote on 2026-07-14, 11:29:

It is a sandisk x110 64gb, I ordered off ebay. The ssd works fine on modern computers and works fine behind a usb2 adapter. Maybe the issue is the the ssd and the sil3112 just dont get along.

I have a 64GB Kingston SSD that will not work on it this shows that some SSD's are not backwards compatible with older SATA speeds.
Also, my pentium 4's SATA II port will also not work with my SSD.
There are older SSD that do work but considering older generation may not be found new.
I am inclined to continue using Hard Disks.

The data sheet says its sata 3.1, 2, and sata 1 compatible. I bought it used, its hard to find 64gb and 32gb ssd drives now. I figured it was older since it was 64gb and sandisk was bought by WD a while back. Is there any list or recomendation as far as ssd and sil controllers?

On a side note, ive been building computers since around 1995. I also worked at a local shop writing software in Visual Basic around 2000. When i worked there I frequently helped out with repair. I have built literally 100s of computers and I have never had an issue preping drives on a different computer as long as long as the software used to prep the drive was compatible with the system the drive was going in to. Im not going to say there may be some edge case issues, but there is no rule of thumb that the computer setting the disk up has to be the computer the disk is installed too.

rwGast wrote on 2026-07-14, 23:42:

On a side note, ive been building computers since around 1995. I also worked at a local shop writing software in Visual Basic around 2000. When i worked there I frequently helped out with repair. I have built literally 100s of computers and I have never had an issue preping drives on a different computer as long as long as the software used to prep the drive was compatible with the system the drive was going in to. Im not going to say there may be some edge case issues, but there is no rule of thumb that the computer setting the disk up has to be the computer the disk is installed too.

It's not a hard rule, it's just easier than explaining "don't partition a drive for Win95B/98 in a machine that has Int13h extensions then move it to a machine that doesn't" or "make sure your partitions are cylinder-aligned when using a DOS OS" or "don't partition a drive as X/255/63 then move it to a non-LBA machine that is X/16/63 and expect to be able to access it" and so on to someone who just wants to play video games, when partitioning it in its "native" environment will avoid all these issues.

Yes but the drive was fdisked on the main machine with no problems. The format was done using windows98. Both the pentium3 and the VM support windows98 int13 extensions. The pentium3 has been able to access the drive and use it fine, it just seems to freak out when dos 7.1 or windows98 try to run from it. It also has the same issues when you disable LBA and use 2 gig partions..

Linux (or NetBSD) would log verbose error info to dmesg if there is any ATA error being generated by the sil3112 if you're willing to try that temporarily, since it doesn't seem there are many better ideas on the thread

Well just to clear any doubt, i got my usb to ata adapter working on my celeron 550mhz thinkpad, that is running win98 se. Next i booted the p3 to the cli using a 98 boot disk. I ran fdisk without large disk support and let it make a 2gig primary active partion, i rebooted then ran fdisk /mbr. Knowing the p3 would lock up during format I used the thinkpad and usb to ata bridge (taking the modern pc/vm out of pic) to format ssd: /s. When I put the ssd in the p3 it froze after post.

Tommorow im going to try to copy the xp install to the ssd and run it from the command line, you can start xp install that way? I dont want XP but this seems like its the next step, so i can figure out if the issue is something 98 related. After that i could definately try linux and read through dmesg. Not real sure how to get a linux install going with no cd rom though.

Slackware 11.0 was just about the last distro to use a 2.4 kernel, and therefore the installer can be booted (but not actually installed) from a few floppies. This won't give you full linux, but would at least give a few utilities to poke around (fdisk, dd, mount -t vfat, etc.) and see if you trigger any SATA errors.

Boot disk for SATA systems including Silicon Image: https://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/s … ootdisks/sata.i
Root disk 1: https://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/s … disks/install.1
Root disk 2: https://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/s … disks/install.2

They're raw floppy disk images, to be written with rawrite, WinImage, or (from another unix machine) dd.

rwGast wrote on 2026-07-14, 11:29:

It is a sandisk x110 64gb, I ordered off ebay. The ssd works fine on modern computers and works fine behind a usb2 adapter. Maybe the issue is the the ssd and the sil3112 just dont get along.

https://support-en.sandisk.com/app/answers/de … lweb/a_id/31759
https://support.lenovo.com/kw/en/downloads/ds … nd-thinkstation

I have two hardware identical SSDs with a SandForce SATA3 chipset: Intel and Kingston.
On nForce 4 (by Gygabayte)))), the Kingston is detected as SATA 2, and the Intel, as SATA1
On the VIA8237 board with SATA 1 , the Kingston has higher stability.
Although, I repeat, they have the same main chip.
Intel simply more customized the reference firmware it received from SandForce more.

But you havent used either with a silicon image controller?

With SIL3512 I use Silicon power 32gb sata 2 (jmicron based ssd) on the cubx-l matherboard

I just picked up a Gigabyte 7IXE (Slot A, AMD chipset), and I used my SiL 3114 when I set it up. Everything worked perfectly, completely by the numbers and the Win98 installation worked perfectly. I initially used a Creative Vibra 16 ISA soundcard, but the bundle of parts included a Creative SB0150 PCI 512, so I decided to test that out (to make sure it worked more than anything). Once I installed that and tried to install the drivers, everything went south rapidly. I was moving both teh SATA card and the soundcard to different slots, but it just wasn't going to work.

I removed the SiL card and used a Startech SATA to IDE adapter instead and reinstalled Windows, and everything works now works fine, including the Creative card. Now that I think about it, both motherboards I've used this SATA card on with no issues have ISA sound cards.

Update: I decided to install my Promise SATA 150 TX2 in this machine, but the only way to get to the desktop after installing it was in Safe Mode. I pulled the PCI 512 and installed a CT2800 ISA card, and everything is now working fine. I think I'll stick with ISA sound cards for this motherboard.