What hardware are you working with?
What motherboard?

Some more details will help get help 😁

gigabyte ga-ep45-ud3l is the motherboard I'm using. It doesn't have win98 drivers but I figured I'd put in a compatible graphics card, sound card, and it should be able to work otherwise. I'm not sure what other hard drive would matter but got half gig of ram, an old generic VGA video card, and pentium 4 processor in

thenix wrote on 2020-05-21, 23:03:

gigabyte ga-ep45-ud3l is the motherboard I'm using. It doesn't have win98 drivers but I figured I'd put in a compatible graphics card, sound card, and it should be able to work otherwise. I'm not sure what other hard drive would matter but got half gig of ram, an old generic VGA video card, and pentium 4 processor in

If your plan is to run a disk larger than 127GB (whether SSD or not) under Windows 9x , have a look at this thread : SSD Woes On Windows 98 SE

As for the driver issue :

There are RLOEW's SATA drivers for Windows . There is even an AHCI mode driver .

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/ptchsata.html

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/ahci9x.html

If that does not work, you can always get a PCI controller card that does work under Windows 98 SE (with drivers) (SIL3512 or SIL3114, Promise Ultra133, etc) .

I don't have answers but I'm curious whether an atapi CD driver and mscdex work in DOS mode? I thought the whole point of IDE compatbility mode was to be, well, IDE compatible. So you'd think it would at least work slowly under Windows. Maybe windows has a whitelist of pci ids or something and it needs to see an .inf file before it'll accept that it's an IDE controller?

I'll add, if driver+mscdex work, that will be a way to at least make it accessible in Windows until you find another solution. I once had one of those Philips external drives with a proprietary ISA controller card that I used this way.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-22, 00:48:

I'll add, if driver+mscdex work, that will be a way to at least make it accessible in Windows until you find another solution. I once had one of those Philips external drives with a proprietary ISA controller card that I used this way.

Let me guess, a CDD461 or CDD462 on a CM-153 interface card ?

darry wrote on 2020-05-22, 01:04:

Let me guess, a CDD461 or CDD462 on a CM-153 interface card ?

I looked at those on Google images and it didn't look like them. The front was significantly bigger than the CD tray and the only button was a (large) eject button. I forget how I came across the drive. I think it was bundled with one of the (multiple) 486 systems I had but didn't keep 🙁

darry wrote on 2020-05-21, 23:25:

If your plan is to run a disk larger than 127GB (whether SSD or not) under Windows 9x , have a look at this thread : SSD Woes […]
Show full quote

thenix wrote on 2020-05-21, 23:03:

gigabyte ga-ep45-ud3l is the motherboard I'm using. It doesn't have win98 drivers but I figured I'd put in a compatible graphics card, sound card, and it should be able to work otherwise. I'm not sure what other hard drive would matter but got half gig of ram, an old generic VGA video card, and pentium 4 processor in

If your plan is to run a disk larger than 127GB (whether SSD or not) under Windows 9x , have a look at this thread : SSD Woes On Windows 98 SE

As for the driver issue :

There are RLOEW's SATA drivers for Windows . There is even an AHCI mode driver .

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/ptchsata.html

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/ahci9x.html

If that does not work, you can always get a PCI controller card that does work under Windows 98 SE (with drivers) (SIL3512 or SIL3114, Promise Ultra133, etc) .

Thank you. I think this is a good possibility for me.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-22, 00:46:

I don't have answers but I'm curious whether an atapi CD driver and mscdex work in DOS mode? I thought the whole point of IDE compatbility mode was to be, well, IDE compatible. So you'd think it would at least work slowly under Windows. Maybe windows has a whitelist of pci ids or something and it needs to see an .inf file before it'll accept that it's an IDE controller?

It's weird. For my system when I use the win98 disk and start windows with cd drivers booting from cd it sees my cd drive fine. Once windows actually boots up it doesn't see it anymore. Windows 98 shows that it has IDE controllers for each of my sata inputs but has an exclamation point on it showing that something is wrong like it doesn't have the driver. I was hoping that on legacy mode the sata would just been seen ad IDE and Windows 98 would be able to work with it like any other IDE.

thenix wrote on 2020-05-22, 06:16:

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-22, 00:46:

I don't have answers but I'm curious whether an atapi CD driver and mscdex work in DOS mode? I thought the whole point of IDE compatbility mode was to be, well, IDE compatible. So you'd think it would at least work slowly under Windows. Maybe windows has a whitelist of pci ids or something and it needs to see an .inf file before it'll accept that it's an IDE controller?

It's weird. For my system when I use the win98 disk and start windows with cd drivers booting from cd it sees my cd drive fine. Once windows actually boots up it doesn't see it anymore. Windows 98 shows that it has IDE controllers for each of my sata inputs but has an exclamation point on it showing that something is wrong like it doesn't have the driver. I was hoping that on legacy mode the sata would just been seen ad IDE and Windows 98 would be able to work with it like any other IDE.

It'll still need a driver for the controller the drives are connected to, unfortunately with your motherboard neither the intel chipset or the additional jmicron sata controller have drivers for windows 9x, the jmicron is windows 2000 and up and the intel P45 chipset is windows XP and up, so only NT drivers, you'll either need a motherboard downgrade or a different controller card for it to work properly in windows 98 as above, Silicon Image or Promise cards tend to work well.

synrgy87 wrote on 2020-05-22, 09:09:

thenix wrote on 2020-05-22, 06:16:

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-22, 00:46:

I don't have answers but I'm curious whether an atapi CD driver and mscdex work in DOS mode? I thought the whole point of IDE compatbility mode was to be, well, IDE compatible. So you'd think it would at least work slowly under Windows. Maybe windows has a whitelist of pci ids or something and it needs to see an .inf file before it'll accept that it's an IDE controller?

It's weird. For my system when I use the win98 disk and start windows with cd drivers booting from cd it sees my cd drive fine. Once windows actually boots up it doesn't see it anymore. Windows 98 shows that it has IDE controllers for each of my sata inputs but has an exclamation point on it showing that something is wrong like it doesn't have the driver. I was hoping that on legacy mode the sata would just been seen ad IDE and Windows 98 would be able to work with it like any other IDE.

It'll still need a driver for the controller the drives are connected to, unfortunately with your motherboard neither the intel chipset or the additional jmicron sata controller have drivers for windows 9x, the jmicron is windows 2000 and up and the intel P45 chipset is windows XP and up, so only NT drivers, you'll either need a motherboard downgrade or a different controller card for it to work properly in windows 98 as above, Silicon Image or Promise cards tend to work well.

There are third party drivers that should work in Windows 9x . See my earlier post in this thread . They are at least woryh a try before trying a PCI controller (which I also suggested as an option).

darry wrote on 2020-05-22, 11:30:

There are third party drivers that should work in Windows 9x . See my earlier post in this thread . They are at least woryh a try before trying a PCI controller (which I also suggested as an option).

Yeah, I've not tried them myself but certainly worth a try, I should have added "If the above doesn't work".

thenix wrote on 2020-05-22, 06:16:

It's weird. For my system when I use the win98 disk and start windows with cd drivers booting from cd it sees my cd drive fine. Once windows actually boots up it doesn't see it anymore. Windows 98 shows that it has IDE controllers for each of my sata inputs but has an exclamation point on it showing that something is wrong like it doesn't have the driver. I was hoping that on legacy mode the sata would just been seen ad IDE and Windows 98 would be able to work with it like any other IDE.

Ah, well if you get exasperated and want a temporary fix, you should be able to put the driver in config.sys and mscdex in autoexec.bat, and it should make the drive visible in Windows, although it will be slow as all i/o to the drive has to drop down into DOS the old-school way.

I have the same problem. Previously, my Windows 98 SE was installed on an IDE hard drive, but I wanted to experience more speed and on the other hand, I wanted to get rid of the noise of a regular hard drive, so I installed my Windows on a 120 MB SSD hard drive. I also had two DVD Writer that worked Correctly before. But after installing Windows98 on the SSD, even though Windows has no problem with the hard drive, it could not detect my IDE DVD Writers. Of course, this problem does not exist on Windows 2000 and XP, which I tried, and DVD Writers are easily detected By Windows.

This is the first Screen of my computer and you can see my computer's specifications in it.

And these are the pictures from my computer's BIOS.
On the second page there are options for the SATA port and you can set it to be detected by the computer as SATA or as one of the IDE channels.
When I set the SATA port as primary IDE master or slave, exactly what I described happens, and that's how I set it up from the beginning. But when I set the SATA port as itself, Windows 98 freezes a few seconds after booting when I try to enter my username and password, and I have to restart the computer.
Of course, in this case, if I boot up Windows into Safe Mode, Windows boots correctly And my DVD Writers are also detected by Windows without any problems.
Now I need to do something so that when the SATA hard drive is detected as SATA, my Windows doesn't hang after booting in normal mode. Or do something so that when the SATA hard drive is detected as IDE, Windows can also recognize my IDE DVD Writers.

(Missing DVD Writers In My Computer Windows 98SE)

(My Device Manager List In Windows 98SE)

(Dual IDE Controller and Primary and Secondary IDE Controller Driver Properties in Windows 98SE)

(DVD Writers In My Computer Windows 2000)

(My Device Manager List In Windows 2000)

(Dual IDE/SATA Controller and Primary and Secondary IDE Controller and DVD WR Driver Properties in Windows 2000)