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Windows 98SE problems with DVD+RW drive

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First post, by maximus

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This is a follow-up to this thread. Long story short: I was having problems with a DVD+RW drive in this machine. Per Jorpho's suggestion, I installed the Intel Application Accelerator. This helped things somewhat, but some problems still remain. Specifically:

  • The drive still takes a long time to eject in some situations (during driver installs, for instance).
  • Games which play music from the CD (e.g., Quake) take a few seconds to change music tracks. The system locks up while the drive is seeking.
  • Pressing the eject button sometimes throws a "drive busy" error. (very seldom)

Yesterday, I replaced the DVD+RW drive with a standard CD-ROM, and all these problems seem to have vanished. The DVD+RW drive works fine in Windows XP systems.

What's going on here? Does Windows 98SE simply not like DVD drives?

PCGames9505

Reply 1 of 4, by Gamecollector

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IIRC many DVD±RWs aren't working correctly without 80-pin IDE cables. As the example - my Optiarc AD-7200A always uses UDMA4 mode.

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Reply 2 of 4, by nforce4max

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I modded a Thinkpad 600 to use a DVD burner and Win98 didn't give much fuss but those ide cables can make a big difference. Some boards don't like using the older 40pin cables and newer drives don't like them either. When the option is there just use all 80pin and never look back, save the 40pin cables for older builds that need them. As for 9x in general I don't like that it takes more effort to get working right compared to xp or win7.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 3 of 4, by maximus

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The whole system is running on 80-pin cables already, so that shouldn't be an issue.

nforce4max wrote:

As for 9x in general I don't like that it takes more effort to get working right compared to xp or win7.

Agreed. Windows XP gets my vote for best retro gaming platform. It tends to do what it's supposed to with minimal fuss. That said, there's definitely a trade-off. Some games and hardware devices require a lot more effort to get working on XP versus 98.

PCGames9505

Reply 4 of 4, by Tetrium

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maximus wrote:

The whole system is running on 80-pin cables already, so that shouldn't be an issue.

nforce4max wrote:

As for 9x in general I don't like that it takes more effort to get working right compared to xp or win7.

Agreed. Windows XP gets my vote for best retro gaming platform. It tends to do what it's supposed to with minimal fuss. That said, there's definitely a trade-off. Some games and hardware devices require a lot more effort to get working on XP versus 98.

It's a bit off-topic, but I recently installed 98SE on a virtual PC a couple days ago, in order to get a logfile to build my own unattended 98SE disk, but 98SE hung at the last part where it had to install drivers (perhaps because I gave the Windows directory another name?) and I had to skip all the drivers.
It asked for the 98SE disk even though it was right there...

Now I know anything could be wrong with it (I was using an ISO file as I misplaced both my original 98SE disks 😵 ), but still, I wasn't impressed with 98SE and it's ability to keep asking for the disk for every **** little change I did. With ME? No such troubles. No need for USB drivers and it comes with more drivers pre-installed. So far I was not impressed with 98SE, but I still I want to give 98SE a fair chance though. I'm pretty sure it must have a use somewhere 🤣

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