justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-29, 22:03:

VDNKh wrote on 2024-01-15, 20:43:

Getting SATA to work on these VIA boards properly, in my experience, requires RLoew's SATA patch for 98 and his PCI patch specifically for VIA chipsets.

Do you mean you've got Win98 to work nicely with this board in SATA IDE mode using this patch? Rather than the RAID mode, which tends to work with the VIA 5.09 drivers?

What is the RLoew VIA PCI patch? I can't see this on either of the sites that archive his other patches?

There's a VIA PCI latency patch by someone other than Rloew, although officially it isn't really for the 8237+, only older Via southbridges... so I wonder if that's what could be referenced.

The thing is, I believe that installing that 'patch' (which isn't really a patch and more a driver) requires getting 98SE to at least... install and boot... (unlike Rloew's patches you can install from DOS), which in my experience was near impossible.

And if you give up on SATA, these K8M800/8237 chipsets seem to work just fine with 98SE without needing to find just the perfect mix of patches and BIOS settings.

Latiodile wrote on 2024-01-29, 20:44:

so i tried these, and i'm getting... more issues, the IDE/SATA driver refuses to install, says it failed and gave me a code -14 first and then just doesn't give me an error after subsequent retries, i'm going to ignore it for now since as far as storage speed goes it still seems fine

and i'm still getting absolutely abysmal performance with my radeon 8500, a 3dmark 2000 score of only 1925 which is.... idk, XP gives me a score of 2400 and benchmarks for this card are hard to find

Do you mean the IDE driver from the VIA installer? You don't need it. The 98 IDE driver doesn't even ship with 5.24 which is why you're getting that error, I think. 98's generic IDE driver works fine.

Can you install 3DMark 2001, open System Info like the image below, and see if you're getting the AGP GART bug that affects these chipsets? If it's 0 bytes then it's bugged and you need to flash an earlier version of the BIOS to get full performance in 98.

justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-29, 22:03:

Do you mean you've got Win98 to work nicely with this board in SATA IDE mode using this patch? Rather than the RAID mode, which tends to work with the VIA 5.09 drivers?

What is the RLoew VIA PCI patch? I can't see this on either of the sites that archive his other patches?

Not on this specific board but on a similar board, the ASUS K8V-MX with TBPlus v3.0, yes I have. PATCHPCI is in the TBPlus patch collection. It is required or else 98 will hang on startup if you apply the SATA patch.

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/tbplus.html

VDNKh wrote on 2024-01-30, 21:31:

Can you install 3DMark 2001, open System Info like the image below, and see if you're getting the AGP GART bug that affects these chipsets? If it's 0 bytes then it's bugged and you need to flash an earlier version of the BIOS to get full performance in 98.

Spoiler

it seems like i'm affected by the GART bug, and after flashing the oldest possible bios.... it still says 0 bytes, on top of not knowing what my CPU is

edit: i found another thread with a similar chipset , and with the information from that thread, the earliest version of the bios for this particular board is from 2005... which is problematic

VDNKh wrote on 2024-01-30, 21:31:

Not on this specific board but on a similar board, the ASUS K8V-MX with TBPlus v3.0, yes I have. PATCHPCI is in the TBPlus patch collection. It is required or else 98 will hang on startup if you apply the SATA patch.

I wish I had discovered this last week (or 3 months ago) when I was battling the same issue, but... now that I've ordered all the parts to convert my setup to full PATA, do I really want to reblow up a working 98SE installation?

I guess the normal SATA patch must be enough only for... Intel... SATA controllers? But not VIA?

Latiodile wrote on 2024-01-30, 23:03:

it seems like i'm affected by the GART bug, and after flashing the oldest possible bios.... it still says 0 bytes, on top of not knowing what my CPU is

edit: i found another thread with a similar chipset , and with the information from that thread, the earliest version of the bios for this particular board is from 2005... which is problematic

What BIOS did you flash to and what CPU do you have? The issue was introduced in sometime in the second half of 2005.

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-30, 23:12:

I wish I had discovered this last week (or 3 months ago) when I was battling the same issue, but... now that I've ordered all the parts to convert my setup to full PATA, do I really want to reblow up a working 98SE installation?

I guess the normal SATA patch must be enough only for... Intel... SATA controllers? But not VIA?

Modern-ish (SATA-III and SATA-II devices sometimes don't play well with old SATA-I interfaces) SSDs on 98 are sure fun. The 98 splash screen goes by faster than it POSTs. Pure PATA does simplify things a lot though. Word to the wise though: if you do use a SATA device, and plan on using EMM386 for whatever reason, you will probably need to exclude some section of memory or else it will hang 98. For me I had to exclude D000-D3FF.

The manual for PATCHPCI doesn't explain much, just that early VIA SATA controllers might hang 98 when used with his custom driver. Intel chipsets don't have this problem, this is just VIA being VIA.

VDNKh wrote on 2024-01-31, 02:15:

What BIOS did you flash to and what CPU do you have? The issue was introduced in sometime in the second half of 2005.

v 1.0, it's apparently from ~february 2005 judging by the last modified date, but after flashing it 3dmark'01 still says 0 bytes, and i only get a score of 1430

my CPU is a sempron 2600+

Any updates on this whole thing? I have the same motherboard that my father got in 2005, with a Sempron 3000+, 1.5 GB of ram and an 80 GB SATA drive, and the BIOS version seems to be 1.3 from what I saw on the POST screen.

I've been trying to change the AHCI mode to legacy but there just seems to be no such option in the BIOS - I can at most disable SATA, and I don't have any IDE drives. I don't see any options to enable/disable RAID either. I could take a risk and flash a different BIOS (although I would be sad to brick my first computer), but maybe I'm just missing the option somewhere? Could somebody show me what their AHCI/RAID option screens look like?

I apologize if I'm necroing the thread or otherwise doing something wrong, I'm new here.

skipster1337 wrote on 2024-02-08, 17:35:

Any updates on this whole thing? I have the same motherboard that my father got in 2005, with a Sempron 3000+, 1.5 GB of ram and an 80 GB SATA drive, and the BIOS version seems to be 1.3 from what I saw on the POST screen.

I've been trying to change the AHCI mode to legacy but there just seems to be no such option in the BIOS - I can at most disable SATA, and I don't have any IDE drives. I don't see any options to enable/disable RAID either. I could take a risk and flash a different BIOS (although I would be sad to brick my first computer), but maybe I'm just missing the option somewhere? Could somebody show me what their AHCI/RAID option screens look like?

I apologize if I'm necroing the thread or otherwise doing something wrong, I'm new here.

i haven't successfully gotten this board to work and at this point i'm looking at other options, later BIOSes give the option to disable raid and set it to simple IDE mode, but on both the newest and oldest bios there's severe performance problems with AGP performance

I don't have an AGP graphics card on hand, I was going to try and get the integrated VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro to run since it apparently had drivers for 98, but seeing all these driver problems I'm not sure if I'm going to follow through.