just to update this for someone who has this board and wants some info, after this im going to leave this aside.
1.Default 98SE driver is an ESDI driver, named as(not literal):
- bus master 5229 master ide
-primary ide fifo.
-secondary ide fifo.
The HDD driver is "MSHDC.INF"
The generic cd-rom driver is "MSCDROM.INF"
You can find both of them inside the "precopy1.cab" from the 98SE installation CD.(open it with winrar)
2.The Ali driver is SCSI driver named as:
-ali ide master ide.
-ali primary ide UDMA.
-ali secondary ide UDMA.
3.With the Microsoft ESDI driver the HDD is recognized as generic type47, to fix this use the patch from Rudolph R. Loew named PTCHDSTR.
4. Using the device manager, updating the 5229 master ide driver manually, choosing the 9x ali driver you just install the master ide driver but not the 1 & 2 ide fifo channels, windows keeps the fifo ones but this is not enough to change the way the drivers works.According to the registry there is 2 registry keys, one for ESDI and another for SCSI and looking there windows still working as ESDI untill you install the full ali driver, I have not tested(i did it, after mess a lot with the registry, i dont trust on that test,any way is 2-3mb read difference) if there is a difference in performance but the LG drive is not bugged with 8x drives listed/recognized.
5.I "found" only one way to install "only 1 drive" instead of 8 (windows keeps recognizing 8 drives). You have to delete just the driver from the windows/inf folder.
If you delete the registry keys associated to the IDE drive windows doent know what you have installed, this means it will send you a pop up every time you turn on the computer about an "unknown drive connected" 8 times!.
If you just delete the inf files, windows keeps the drives to show them in the device manager with the yellow advice on each one, you can disable each one there.
Even doing this the problem is not solved, for example Turok, which uses the first drive of the computer to recognize the CD (and by this way you have OST in the game) cant recognize the CD, even if you make sure your only drive letter is the first one after the HDD.
Another problem comes with this, if you plug in a USB storage before windows run (or i assume whatever device wich windows assign a letter to it) the new device keeps the first letter, even if you assign the letter using the device manager or the registry.
Another problem is, even if you disable the drives in device manager, windows still showing them in My Computer... i have managed to fix that using the program TweakUI which allows you to remove them from My Computer.
One time, after doing all this stuff, i have changed the letter for my drive in the registry, restart the computer and run windows in safe mode without restarting to windows normal mode (what a mistake), changed here something and then restart windows to normal mode , and what a surprise!, i had 1 drive + another ghost drive in My Computer. So i had to install drivers for all the drives (because that letter was already disabled in TweakUI for My computer and it appears there anyway), delete the inf files and start again, once done everything properly Turok still not recognizing the CD.
My thoughts and conclusion:
I have tried many times, no idea if there is a method to disable that drives etc but i put on it a lot of work, not worth it, i havent tried another brand, im going to do it.
I havent searched a lot info about ESDI and SCSI drives, from what i have read the SCSI bus is composed by 8 drives (I don't know how it would be at that time, technology evolves), is there an incompatibility and the drive is marked as 8 drives and taking the entire SCSI bus? (no idea if this mean more resourses for the computer or is just a ghost drives).
ESDI according to wikipedia can handle data rates of 10, 15, or 20 Mbit/s, i've done a crystal disk mark test and i got 23-25 read/30-31 write, does not reflect the test result.
SCSI can handle more speed (no idea how was in that time), because my board only can handle UDMA 33, if here is not any performance problem (i havent tested, i mean a problem, not just speed rate) 3-5 mb /s is not too much difference (now i have 27,5/31 with the ali one) but if someone has the UDMA 66 version and it happens that the performance is the same you have a bottleneck problem, so i recommend to change for another brand whatever the case, but especially if a bottleneck occurs as I have mentioned.
Cheers.