Damn, apologies for bumping my own thread but I'd be happy to hear any suggestion as this is really annoying me. I get piss poor HDD performance and it's quite a bottleneck 🙁 I still can't get DMA to work with Win98, it keeps freezing on boot.
I have:
- Tried another 80pins IDE cable
- Kept only a single hard drive
- Tried two different SATA-PATA adapters, both working fine for DMA in other builds
- Reinstalled Win98 from scratch
- Installed VIA 4in1 (that includes bus master driver) 4.251a as it is the version I've found on archive.org on the old FIC support page for this motherboard
- If I set the UDMA mode in BIOS from Auto to Disabled, Win98 boots again and the DMA option is checked for both disks. If I uncheck it, I can set UDMA mode back to auto in BIOS and it boots fine as well. So I'm sure it's the source of the booting freeze.
- I'm running latest BIOS (1.13AB135)
I wanted to try an IDE HDD to rule out the adapters even if they work with other builds, but it's dead 🙁 and don't have another one.
On the archived FIC page, there's also a mention of what I understand may be 3rd party DMA drivers that could be supported : HighPoint XStore Pro 1.20, but the download links are down. Is that worth a try? Would anyone have a copy? Googling around didn't help much, only found dead links.
I'd really appreciate any help at this stage. Are people successfully running UDMA on a FIC-PA2010+? If so are they running VIA 4-in-1, and which version? In the past I also tried later versions of 4-in-1 with similar results.
Many thanks!