Horun wrote on 2020-05-23, 03:21:
Curious, you say you had issues with regular IDE drives on that motherboard ? When you switched to the PCI SATA card did you disable the onboard IDE ? It is possible that even if you did the drivers for the onboard IDE are still being loaded. Win98 is not a very smart OS and you could have a driver conflict which flagged the Compatibilty mode. I remember having a bad IDE CDROM under Win98 and it reverted to compat mode and could not clear it even after replacing the cdrom with a working one. Took some reg fix but am tired and cannot recall exact what was needed...
All right, gonna check that up...
I've just tried disabling the IDE controller on the BIOS (I remember disabling it from the Device Manager itself before, but yeah, maybe it's not as effective as doing it on the BIOS). I can see it is disabled since the IDE Bus Master device inside the Hard Disk Controllers section says it is disabled. Good. So then I check out the Performance section under System and..... nope, still using MS-DOS compatibility mode.
darry wrote on 2020-05-23, 03:10:
That is strange .
On the off chance you have missed something significant , would you mind sharing the contents of your autoexec.bat and config.sys, just in case ?
Also how many drives do how have connected and do they all show up as using compatibility mode .?
Sure, I'm going to check them up again, hold on....
Nope, as I said before, both autoexec.bat and config.sys are empty of any relevant files. I even removed my 2 sound cards while trying to remove any conflicts that I could be having.
The system is as bare as it could be (just a video card, a network card and the SATA card).
I've only got the SSD and then an IDE DVD-ROM that I used to install windows into. Actually, good point, I'm gonna try plugging in a spare IDE hard drive that I have as slave on the same channel (since I don't have another 40-pin IDE cable) and see how that goes...
I was able to get my older hard drives with windows 98 installed on them working, but ONLY when I set the jumper in the Capacity Limit pins, so it can only see the first 32 GB of the drives. Why is this? spotty detection when in full size, but perfectly fine in 32GB capacity limit....
Oh, also yeah, running the Win98 installed on this HDD connected to the IDE bus (after letting Windows install the 440ZX chipset drivers on its own) made it run with no compatibility mode!!! so yeah, something about the SIL3512 or the SSD seems to be forcing it to run in compatibility mode.
Is it OK to use the IDE HDD like this? it has a 114 GB partition, and Windows sees the full size of this partition just fine, but in theory it's now capacity-limited to 32GB through the jumper, and it's already 20 GB full. Could it corrupt any data saved beyond 32GB or something? if anyone else knows about this I would be grateful that he'd enlighten me about this deal.
darry wrote on 2020-05-23, 03:25:
According to https://www.techrepublic.com/article/solve-ms … eshooting-tips/
another scenario is a boot sector virus .
I would add to that the presence of an old DDO (dynamic drive overlay) on the SSD as another scenario .
Just saying... I heavily doubt there's a virus here since the system has been barely used at all (couldn't even get to games since the compatibility mode was bugging me all the time).
How do I check for that DDO thing? any way I can disable or remove it? the way I installed 98 on this machine was to let Win98 Setup format the disk by itself after FDISK made a 17 gig (?) partition on the SSD. Then after booting up Setup it formatted that on its own, and went on to installing Windows 98... Just saying, I'm not sure since I haven't got much experience with 98, but maybe it didn't like that?...
Oh, and I also expanded that 17 gig to the full 120 gig size of the SSD, but I did that in gparted, with the SSD plugged into another machine, while I was grabbing drivers for the 440zx and putting them on it, so I could save on wasting CDs for that, since this install of Win98 didn't even have network drivers for this card.
darry wrote on 2020-05-23, 03:35:
Another site with some recommendation that you may or may not have seen/tried .
https://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/FAQ/SingleQu … QuestionId=1363
Oh! maybe this works, I'm going to try it immediately, and to try isolating things, I'm going to do it with the IDE channels disabled...
OK, so I've just typed in 32BitDiskAccess=On inside of the [386Enh] in SYSTEM.INI, then rebooted (didn't do any of the other things since I've got no weird drivers on them) I was initially hopeful since I didn't have any 32BitDiskAccess string at all on it.... sadly it didn't do it. Windows keeps using compatibility mode. I just tried setting it to Off just in case, then rebooted. Same result. Bummer.
