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GA-P43-ES3G + W98SE IDE + Rloew mem, lba48, sata, ahci = ~20mn long pause at boot

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First post, by Golffies

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Philip in Australia manages to run 98SE with a Core2Quad, on Gigabyte's GA-P43T-ES3G motherboard, equipped with a P43 chipset and DDR3 slots. In a similar configuration (almost identical GA-P43-ES3G, but with DDR2 slots), I'm stuck; the installation was painstaking but successful, and booting in safe mode is possible. However, booting in normal mode freezes for about 20 minutes on this screen, and sometimes randomly freezes endlessly. Windows 98 SE is installed on a Compact Flash card and boots from this volume on a conventional 40-pin IDE slot.

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Where are the logs on Windows 98, which could tell which driver is causing the freezing? Creating a special profile by deactivating all driverless hardware marked with a yellow question mark in the hardware manager, and booting with this profile, doesn't improve anything.

The ~20mn freeze at startup also occurs when:

  • disabling as many functions as possible in the motherboard's BIOS settings (no SATA, no USB, no Ethernet port, no serial or parallel ports, no audio, etc.);
  • plugging in a genuine PS/2 keyboard and mouse;
  • limiting RAM to a single 512MB stick;
  • underclocking the Q9450 processor to 864Mhz, thanks to BIOS settings;
  • removing all PCI cards from their slots, except for the 9500GT GPU on PCIe, as the P43 has no iGPU.

When start-up fails to go further, after an hour or more, Windows 98 SE seems to make disk accesses (the "HDD access" LED lights up) and corrupts the FAT16 volume allocation table on the Compact Flash card. Several times, the corruption of the Compact Flash card's FAT16 file system beyond repair was highlighted with the fsck.vfat tool on Linux, and it was necessary to restore the Compact Flash card to its previous state by restoring a saved image of the volume.

On one occasion, this error message appeared, but it may simply be the result of file system corruption on the Compact Flash card.

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When, on the contrary, the boot attempt is interrupted by a manual reset of the machine, rather than continuing for an unreasonably long time, no file system corruption is observed on the Compact Flash card, and it is possible to reboot Windows 98 SE from the Compact Flash card for a new attempt.

When Windows 98 SE successfully boots to the desktop, it is displayed in 16-color VGA mode. The system control panel reports that Windows 98 SE uses a real mode MS-DOS driver to access its IDE slot boot disk, which it shouldn't do.

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Is this the beginning of an explanation?

Reply 1 of 1, by Golffies

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The motherboard BIOS is not the most faithful ally. Due to a lack of documentation on the one hand, and the poor ergonomics of the BIOS screens on the other, it's difficult for the user to be sure that the chosen parameters do what they're supposed to do. Although the SATA ports are carefully set to ‘legacy’ mode, does this motherboard's BIOS really assign to first SATA & IDE drives I/O addresses 1F0h and 170h, and IRQ14 and IRQ15, to which Windows 98 expects to find hard drives? Well, when I reboot the machine under Linux, neither dmesg, lspci nor lshw give this information; unfortunately I don't have the right tools to check.

After days of attempts, reinstallation on a blank Compact Flash card, with or without Rudolph Loew's additional drivers at the first reboot, with a GPU on the PCIe or PCI slot, with RAM capped at 512 MB or increased to 16 GB, with processor clocks at full speed or lowered below Gigahertz, with PCI and USB peripherals plugged in or unplugged, the same behaviour occurs repeatedly: Windows 98 SE installs itself after several reboots, runs its PnP driver detection procedure, but never manages to display the desktop, except in Safe Mode.

In the course of this long series of tests, the only peripherals that I could not remove were:

  • the Compact Flash card plugged into the 40-pin IDE/PATA port on the motherboard (the Windows "C:" drive);
  • the SSD with a copy of the Windows 98 SE installation CD, plugged into SATA port 0, one of the motherboard ports that the BIOS allows you to switch to "legacy IDE" mode.

On one or two occasions during my attempts, this screen appeared, suggesting that perhaps on this motherboard, the problem could come from that specific setup?

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As far as I can remember, this warning only appeared when the SSD ports were left in AHCI mode in the BIOS, even though the AHCI driver of Rudolph Loew had not yet been installed. Well, it prompted me to check whether I had installed the drivers of Rudolph on all the controllers, marked as "unknown PCI device" in the device manager.

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Of the unknown PCI devices reported in the Device Manager, there was still one that could be handled by Rudolph's drivers.

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To repeat the attempt on several ‘unknown PCI devices’, the easiest thing to do is to put Rudolph's drivers' .inf files in a “rloew” folder at the root of the C: drive, for example, and tell Windows that this folder is the source to explore each time it is asked to look for a driver for a device. This automates the work a little.

Finally, with all the devices disabled in the BIOS, there is only one ‘unknown PCI device’ left in the Device Manager.

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The bad news is that even after disabling it, Windows 98 SE continues to hang on start-up.
At this point, I think I have used up most of what I could have tried. Now that Rudolph's SATA and AHCI drivers are correctly installed on all the compatible controllers on the motherboard, I doubt that's where the hang is coming from. Does legacy IDE compatibility still need to be maintained? I don't think so. Am I wrong ? I lack imagination.

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