VOGONS

AM3+ Win98: Disabling "safe to turn off your computer"

Topic actions

First post, by AaronS

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

I put together an AM3+ (ASUS M5A97 R2.0 MB) with the intention of dual booting between 98/XP/Vista. Up to now I've only been messing with 98 and it runs solid on this board with a Quadro FX600 PCI + Audigy 2 ZS. There are two issues (not affecting performance really but wanted to see if anyone here had an idea).

The first is to do with ACPI which is probably normal for such a late board using ACPI 2.0a I believe this has. I had to setup windows 98se with the "/p i" flag otherwise lots of Device Manager errors. The only thing in my bios mentioning ACPI is "C1E" which I disabled. But of course every time I shut down the system I have to press the power button to turn it off. I've read about people wanting to force this message and using regedit to add ACPIOption = 2 (I tried this but adding 1, which made the system worse and unable to shut down at all, it would reboot, which is common with non functioning ACPI. I also tried the Win98 Quick Install "fully patched with DirectX 8.1" option and, that actually shuts down fine, so eitherits using a patch that is able to bypass this and shut down normally or some tweak I'm not aware of.

The other thing is in Device Manager I have a "PCI System Management Bus" yellow exclamation, to be honest I expected way more than just this one thing, a quick google search brings up this forum post:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-is- … ent-bus.561714/

In which user "Medic" talks about a PCI patch "pci16W.zip", unfortunately the link is dead but they also mention Via, which my board doesn't use, but not sure if its a generic patch that might fix this yellow exclamation. Afaik this isn't negatively affecting anything so I don't care too much but it would be nice to see a "clean" device manager.

Fixed this at least, although don't think its a fix more of a inf file to ignore it, see my reply below.

Last edited by AaronS on 2025-10-27, 23:06. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 2, by AaronS

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Thanks. I gave it a go by installing through the device manager as Have Disk and pointed to the inf, no more exclamation and now shows under system devices as "VIA Power Management Controller" but no errors. Interesting that it's also related to power like the ACPI / shutdown thing (but yes, that message still appears when shutting down).

Okay so thanks to a video by omores that I watched regarding an AM3+ board he used, the "PCI System Management Bus" is actually an AMD chipset thing. You can simply install the Windows XP driver for it and it will then appear under System devices, but again I think it's just to simply get rid of the exclamation, same thing in Windows XP device manager too. I'll attach the one that was on the Asus website for my M5A97 R2.0 board if anyone stumbles across this but check your boards website/drivers to see if there's one specifically for it first. They should all pretty much be the same though.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to General Old Hardware
Close window
Close window