A while back I picked up a system that had clearly been used as an HTPC, built around a VIA EPIA CN mini-ITX motherboard. This seemed like a pretty ideal board for a compact Win98 system, as it has both IDE and SATA, official driver support, and the case has a slot loading DVD-RW (P-IDE) and PCI riser for an SB Live! for some DOS game comparability.

I added an 80gb Intel SATA SSD that I found cheaply (passes all Scandisk checks etc) and partitioned it into two FAT32 partitions for Win98 and for files, and an NTFS partition for XP dual boot. I copied the setup files for both to the files partition, set up Win98SE first, then XP, in dual boot. Which was fine.

When I got around to setting up the drivers properly, I found 98SE had problems with one of the IDE controllers (i.e. the SATA controller) showing with a yellow exclamation mark in device manager, saying it was stopped and wouldn't be started again. Initially I tried installing various versions of VIA 4in1 drivers, without much luck, then found the instructions for very similar sounding symptoms here: MSI MS-7253 / K9VGM-V (KM890, VIA8237A) , Athlon 64 X2 5050e, Radeon X800 XL

But I ended up with a pretty thoroughly broken installation, which would hang when detecting the IDE controllers when I deleted them in safe mode. It would find the VIA bus master driver, but when I pressed next, it would totally hang. (Same when choosing any other driver version).

The weird bit has been the fact I haven't been able to get a working Win98SE installation again!

First I tried just reinstalling Win98SE from the same setup files over itself. And it would hang every time setup got to detecting plug and play devices.

I turned off ACPI and PnP in the BIOS, as well as the secondary IDE controller (so Windows would only see two bus master controllers). No luck. Removing the SBLive! and USB drive, replacing USB keyboard and mouse with PS/2 didn't make any difference either.

Next I tried deleting the contents of the C drive, apart from the XP boot loader components (to try not to break dual boot). Exactly the same result. No number of reboots, including going into and then out of safe mode, would get it past detecting Plug and Play devices.

Next, I tried formatting C: (which has broken the XP bootloader) and again installing Win98SE from the original files. This time, it doesn't get past the initial reboot. The Win98 splash screen animates for a moment, it drops to the command prompt with the code page etc output showing, and just sits forever with a blinking cursor top left. Going into safe mode just brings an error that Windows can't detect devices in safe mode.

Resetting the BIOS to failsafe defaults etc didn't make any difference.

I'm really confused that it worked once, but now won't get past hardware detection. It almost feels like messing around with the VIA 4 in 1 drivers has somehow actually broken something at hardware level! The setup files are the same ones that worked before, and surely a reset bios and formatted partition should work, if they did before?

The only things I can think of left to try is deleting and re-creating the partition in FDISK? (Could be objecting to something XP has done to the MBR?) Should I try deleting the XP partition, and running FDISK/MBR as well?

Is there anything else to try? I feel like I've wasted so many hours, but when it worked originally (albeit with the yellow exclamation on the SATA controller) - it must be possible to get it work again, right?!