look to see if you can use non-RAID/IDE BIOS. Xp will work fine with raid bios but you're not using XP you are using 98. This is a differnt scenario. Don't mirror the drives or create a raid. Drives should be run in IDE mode.

You can also try Rloew sata Patch. I would install the sata patch and the 137GB patch. You can find the archive on wayback. Instructions in archive. This might solve the problem. Since you don't have a proper Bios. Reason similar other cards work is people flash the cards to non raid bios. But since yours in integreated on the motherboard thats a different scenario.

https://archive.org/details/rloewelectronics.com

Warlord wrote on 2022-03-01, 17:19:

look to see if you can use non-RAID/IDE BIOS. Xp will work fine with raid bios but you're not using XP you are using 98. This is a differnt scenario.

I understand. I am afraid I may not be able to get any other BIOS onto the controller, I think it's tied to the system BIOS or I may be getting confused with other systems over the years. The controller options look spartan when I go in there since there is only a single drive. I believe it defaults to an IDE mode when only one drive is connected but could be wrong there. I assume it would default to an LBA48 mode as well. Could that be the issue in not being able to properly access the drive? It doesn't make sense to me since it successfully copied files from the install CD to it.

I will try the patches next.

If it were me, I'd use a SATA to IDE adapter to install Win98, and once that was done, make sure the drivers for the SATA port were installed correctly and see if I could then move the drive to the SATA port.

Can you share a link to your current motherboard BIOS ? AFAICR, updating or changing the bundled option ROM for those types of integrated controllers might not be that complicated .

darry wrote on 2022-03-01, 18:06:

Can you share a link to your current motherboard BIOS ? AFAICR, updating or changing the bundled option ROM for those types of integrated controllers might not be that complicated .

That's right. I forgot that was even a thing. It's been a long time since I messed with integrated controllers.

This is the BIOS I currently have loaded on the machine:
https://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/archiv … roII/18d110.zip

Integrated controllers that support RAID are supposed to have a BIOS switch for RAID and if it's on, then you wouldn't be able to use it normally. With the add-in cards, the Silicon Image SATA chips have firmware for both RAID and regular use and you can convert/switch the card's access mode simply by swapping the firmware with the Silicon Image utility. These firmware versions and their enabled functions will also differ between the manufacturer of the chipset and the vendor of the card, so you have to carefully determine which one works best with your card and which ones to avoid using for specific functions.

I have a Gigabyte motherboard with this chip and a 500G sata hard drive connected to it. The BIOS offers 2 options: BASE and RAID and I always had problems with the BASE option. I'm using the w98 drivers provided with the motherboard. I triple boot between devuan, Windows XP and Windows 98 with grub. I remember installing a patch to be able to use more than 512MBytes of RAM and I probably patched it to use 48bits LBA but I no longer recall.
More info here: Hard drive and partition sizes in Windows 98 SE

EduBat wrote on 2022-03-01, 22:22:

I have a Gigabyte motherboard with this chip and a 500G sata hard drive connected to it. The BIOS offers 2 options: BASE and RAID and I always had problems with the BASE option. I'm using the w98 drivers provided with the motherboard. I triple boot between devuan, Windows XP and Windows 98 with grub. I remember installing a patch to be able to use more than 512MBytes of RAM and I probably patched it to use 48bits LBA but I no longer recall.
More info here: Hard drive and partition sizes in Windows 98 SE

That sounds exactly what I need to do! I haven't had a chance to try to patches yet but they are what I shall try first. I thought there could be an issue with LBA48 or maybe AHCI.

edit:
Tinkered with it late last night but didn't get far. It just dawned on me that perhaps I don't have the BIOS set to boot from SCSI. /facepalm
I will check it out when I get home today. Will I have issues with it being a single large 500gb partition? I'm not quite understanding what I need to do to properly address the whole drive.

edit 2:
SCSI boot wasn't the fix. I'm going to try an older 20gb drive next to rule out the large drive issues.

edit 3:
I kept getting blue screens even with a slipstream install of 98 to the 20gb drive on the SIL3112.
I then tried a 60gb on the IDE channel, which Windows installed without issue. I turned on the RAID controller and rebooted and installed the proper RAID driver through windows. After that, I used Clonezilla to clone that image to my 500gb drive, which then booted Windows as a 60gb drive. I tempted fate and used Partition Resizer to expand the drive out to capacity of 500gb. After that, Windows is hanging again like it did the first time. I can only assume that partition sizes are what is not working for me at all. I may try again later with the partition set to under 137gb.

I've got it all working now. Keeping 98 on a 100gb partition and have XP installed on the other 400gb. Only nuance to install XP was needing to load a driver off floppy.

I had to dust off the old man Teac to get the job done. 😀