First post, by W Gruffydd
I'm trying to get the board running to its fullest. Any driver assistance would be appreciated.
Since I only started building PCs in 2003, I'm accustomed to mobo manufacturers providing drivers on their website. Granted, the absolute latest drivers for third-party hardware like chipsets and ethernet were found directly from the manufacturers of this hardware, but at least the mobo manufacturers' drivers provided a starting point.
Since the Abit we knew is gone, I checked Wayback. However, there are no drivers listed for the LX6, even a year after the LX6 was released. Nor are there drivers labeled as LX anything on the 20GB full backup of Abit's FTP from well into the 2000s. Come to think of it, I don't see any drivers for Abit's legendary BX chipset boards, either. Were you supposed to get chipset drivers directly from the component manufactures during this era? I hope not, because I'm having a difficult time finding old Intel drivers for the LX chipset.
Never the less, here is what I've done so far.
- Identified: Intel 440LX chipset = 82443LX northbridge + 82371AB southbridge
- Installed: Windows 95 OSR 2.5.
- Installed: PCI Bridge Batch File
The LX6 Manual says that Windows 95 can't "recognize" the LX chipset without this, although I don't think this can be considered the chipset driver, as it only seems to affect part of the southbridge. Device manager will display "? PCI Bridge" and "? PCI Universal Serial Bus" errors under Other Devices if this is not installed. Even with OSR2.5 installed, I can confirm this is true.
The URL recommended by the manual for downloading the batch file wasn't crawled, but the batch file itself, PCI_TX.EXE, is still on the 20GB ftp backup. Using PCI_TX.EXE removes the errors, and adds Intel 82371AB Power Management Controller under System devices and Intel 82371AB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller under Universal serial bus controller. These two are the only two things affected in the Device Manager; every other device uses the OSR 2.5 drivers dated 8-24-1996.
PIIX4 Southbridge
This is where it gets confusing.
Within the driver page I linked earlier, the Others link will give you a driver for the southbridge, 82371AB, more commonly known as PIIX4. It mainly appears to enable Ultra DMA/33 in IDE.
The release is 1.20:
Filename:PIIX412.EXE Date:8/14/97 NOTE : 1. New Release for use of Intel Chipset with Intel Master IDE Device Driver (Release 1. […]
Filename:PIIX412.EXE
Date:8/14/97
NOTE :
1. New Release for use of Intel Chipset with Intel Master IDE Device Driver (Release 1.20)
2. supports Ultra DMA/33
However #1:
For installation of Ultra DMA/33 drives, the LX6 Manual references a driver disk that came with the mobo containing "Bmide_95." I can find no trace of this on Wayback or the FTP backup. I'm guessing the name stands for Bus Master IDE, but how might this compare to PIIX412.EXE?
However #2:
A vogons user claims that Windows OSR 2 included Bus Master drivers automatically. Yet, a Tom's article from August 1997 claims that while OSR 2 provided Bus Master drivers automatically for the PIIX in the 430FX chipset and the PIIX3 in the 430HX and 430VX, the release of PIIX4 in the 430TX required a new Intel or Triton driver yet again. The LX6 uses PIIX4 too.
Assuming I get the PIIX4 query sorted, is there anything else I should install or tweak in regards to supporting of the motherboard?
Other than that, I will enable DMA mode through the HDD properties in Windows.
