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.

Well ok so I have some good news I have this exact board and a lot of experience with it. 1.) To set up this board you MUST change the SATA mode from IDE to RAID. 2.)The Sata controller seems to conflict with my SB Live! In slot2 which is a huge problem because that’s the best slot IRQ wise. 3.)If you’re going to use this board use an IDE drive and disable Ultra DMA and use regular DMA and put your SBLive in slot 2 for the best IRQ assignment and stability. 4.) Use version 4.56 of the 4 in 1 Hypertension drivers they worked well for me.

I believe that all the current images online have the UDMA options hidden which should be toggled to avoid some strange lockups when exiting dos games. I will upload the modded bios that I modded again to enable more features to archive.org and link it in my next comment.

The Modded bios can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/ms-7142-d
Hope this solves everything -Dylan

P.S: I'll Update this thread when and If I work out the conflict with the SATA controller and my sound blaster live in slot 2 with my 9600SE installed. Oddly the SB128PCI seems to function perfectly in that slot with SATA but it's a bit limited and I mean the OPL is comically bas at least the Live! is serviceable and EAX is far better with the Live! well I hope this helps I've had this board for about 2 years now and it's been ok not amazing, but I can't argue since I got it for free from a robocop eMachines Sempron PC that someone was chucking.

Let me know if you run into any new issues or make some new discoveries of your own also I used version 4.56 thanks for hosting the drivers Phil! 4in1:https://www.philscomputerlab.com/via-chipset-drivers.html

I also with my most recent configuration with SATA and the SB128 in PCI Slot 2 used the driver bundle from Phils Gigabyte Board: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ga-k8vm800m.html

The drawbacks to SATA on this board are that the VT8237R only supports SATA1. However, support for SATA 2 and 3 was fixed with the Plus model of the chipset on Phils board. Also, your PCI resource assignment options are limited despite the Modded BIOS.

dylan5568 wrote on 2026-02-21, 06:30:

The Modded bios can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/ms-7142-d Hope this solves everything -Dylan […]
Show full quote

The Modded bios can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/ms-7142-d
Hope this solves everything -Dylan

P.S: I'll Update this thread when and If I work out the conflict with the SATA controller and my sound blaster live in slot 2 with my 9600SE installed. Oddly the SB128PCI seems to function perfectly in that slot with SATA but it's a bit limited and I mean the OPL is comically bas at least the Live! is serviceable and EAX is far better with the Live! well I hope this helps I've had this board for about 2 years now and it's been ok not amazing, but I can't argue since I got it for free from a robocop eMachines Sempron PC that someone was chucking.

Let me know if you run into any new issues or make some new discoveries of your own also I used version 4.56 thanks for hosting the drivers Phil! 4in1:https://www.philscomputerlab.com/via-chipset-drivers.html

I also with my most recent configuration with SATA and the SB128 in PCI Slot 2 used the driver bundle from Phils Gigabyte Board: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ga-k8vm800m.html

The drawbacks to SATA on this board are that the VT8237R only supports SATA1. However, support for SATA 2 and 3 was fixed with the Plus model of the chipset on Phils board. Also, your PCI resource assignment options are limited despite the Modded BIOS.

unfortunately my board was affected by the AGP GART bug, so I had to buy a different board as I couldn't find a bios that solved it
my Radeon 8500 also died since I made this thread and have yet to find a replacement card

I have never heard of this issue before I will have to try and see if I can replicate the bug later. I will say though that this boards Sata controller really hates my sound blaster live though as soon as the driver is installed the computer hard crashes right after the raid BIOS and I'll even occasionally get back into windows with a code 11 "Windows will not attempt to restart this device since it failed to start". So yeah, this board is not ideal at all I had the SB128 totally working maybe I can get the ESS solo 1 going too. I'm still toying with it on and off. At least these patches will get you through the install and into windows 98 with the S3 onboard card. Not an ideal setup and it is slow and bad with SVesa modes (Duke 3D does terrible in 800*600). But I wouldn't be surprised the board has AGP issues for sure using an older ATI RAGE 128 with this motherboard yielded better results for conflicts and compatibility in the past on IDE eliminating EPIC Pinballs instability however that is the fault of my 9600SE my socket 423 system also crashes with that card installed when playing Epic pinball. Also, later versions of the VIA 4in1 chipset drivers have prevented me from installing the 9600SE gpu drivers however the Omega Driver packs always worked. This board is frustratingly stupid but with the right software/config it just works once it's going.

Phil seemed to have some issues with his Fx 5500 on the newer chipset drivers it showed up as pci instead of agp.
https://youtu.be/rc4vivgEriU?si=SLZD2Z3LGGXGoAY7