Trying to install WinMe now...

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-22, 02:26:

Trying to install WinMe now...

Same results with Me, trying XP... that'll be a better way of telling if something's fried with the hardware...

And XP seems... happy.

In fact, wow, I'm amazed, this feels like the first time I've ever installed XP without at least one unrecognized device in Device Manager. Apparently they slipped a 2004 driver for the GeForce FX onto the SP3 media...

I will probably leave it on XP for a few weeks/months, do not have a lot of time to play with this in the next little while.

I finally had some time to go back and try Win98 SE (after also acquiring less RAM), and... well, let's just say I could never get SATA working. Crashes up the wazoo even with the rloew patch.

Plugged SSD into a Startech IDE to SATA adapter, disabled SATA controller, and 98SE runs happily so far.

Time to shop for a PATA optical drive...

Good to hear you got XP on it and sorta working on Win98. Which model K8M800 is it ? just curious....

Try installing Win98 with the onboard graphics set to use as much of the RAM as possible.

Horun wrote on 2024-01-28, 05:39:

Good to hear you got XP on it and sorta working on Win98. Which model K8M800 is it ? just curious....

This is the Biostar K8M800 AM2 board. Something I picked up on eBay (there's a seller there selling these quasi-new with reasonable single-core AM2 chips, some RAM, etc) that struck me as having a ton of retro potential for less cost/more flexibility than a 754 board with the same chipset, although... I am not sure I still feel that way now. It worked great in XP, I might add, but... umm... who wants a single-core XP system with an FX5900? And the 'oh, it has the fixed newer 8237+ chip without the big SATA bugs, maybe it can run with plentiful SATA peripherals' gamble turned out to be dreadfully wrong.

I think it's fully working on Win98 now, that SATA controller/drives just messed everything up, but with the SATA controller fully disabled in the BIOS and another reformat/reinstall, it seems happy (except for a 'ghost' floppy). I ordered a NOS PATA ODD from eBay and will just run this thing as a fully PATA system. The cable management in a microATX case will be absolutely dreadful...

Now, the interesting question - do I want to leave it with 256 megs of DDR2-533 RAM, or put the eBay seller's 1GB stick back in and start messing with the rloew and other patches?

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-28, 14:16:

I think it's fully working on Win98 now

I may have spoken too soon, it seems... very crash-prone this morning...

I had a similar nightmare trying to get a Skt754 board with the same VIA southbridge and also gave up on getting SATA working in Win98.

But then I left it a while and gave it "one more try". This time I enabled SATA in RAID mode, and did a fresh format of the C partition (leaving it on an IDE drive). This time Win98 installed absolutely fine, without any patches! The SATA controller was detected as an unknown SCSI controller until the VIA 4in1 drivers set it up fine. The extra SATA drive has an XP installation and I'm planning to keep it separate.

So it doesn't eliminate IDE, but you could use it for secondary and optical drives?

I think in previous attempts that failed it was either using SATA for C drive, or switching between SATA IDE and RAID modes without doing a full format between.

justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-28, 15:39:

I had a similar nightmare trying to get a Skt754 board with the same VIA southbridge and also gave up on getting SATA working in […]
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I had a similar nightmare trying to get a Skt754 board with the same VIA southbridge and also gave up on getting SATA working in Win98.

But then I left it a while and gave it "one more try". This time I enabled SATA in RAID mode, and did a fresh format of the C partition (leaving it on an IDE drive). This time Win98 installed absolutely fine, without any patches! The SATA controller was detected as an unknown SCSI controller until the VIA 4in1 drivers set it up fine. The extra SATA drive has an XP installation and I'm planning to keep it separate.

So it doesn't eliminate IDE, but you could use it for secondary and optical drives?

I think in previous attempts that failed it was either using SATA for C drive, or switching between SATA IDE and RAID modes without doing a full format between.

Did the RAID mode work for optical drives? Hmmmmm...

When I had SATA on, in IDE mode, with just the optical drive on SATA, 98SE gave a crazy weird message in a blue screen about how all subdevices must be in the same mode or something, and the net effect of what was to throw everything into legacy DOS mode and I couldn't get out of it without doing a full reinstall.

My eBay order was cancelled (seller realized he had mixed up SATA/PATA drives), so back to shopping for a PATA ODD. Or I suppose I could try throwing another Startech IDE to SATA adapter at a SATA ODD but one of those costs half as much as a PATA drive...

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-28, 16:03:

Did the RAID mode work for optical drives? Hmmmmm...

Good point ...

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-28, 16:03:

When I had SATA on, in IDE mode, with just the optical drive on SATA, 98SE gave a crazy weird message in a blue screen about how all subdevices must be in the same mode or something, and the net effect of what was to throw everything into legacy DOS mode and I couldn't get out of it without doing a full reinstall.

I had exactly the same experience with this error.

Its far as I could work out, I think it sounded like this is a consequence of Win98 expecting IDE controllers to be on specific IRQs only, so a third one on a different IRQ just won't work in the way it would in XP etc. I did briefly try disabling the secondary IDE controller but enabling the SATA in IDE mode, to see if the BIOS would reallocate the SATA controller to the standard IRQ of the secondary IDE, but it didn't seem to do that on my MSI Skt754 board. It sounded like perhaps the 'Compatibility mode' on some BIOSes would do this from the discussion I saw (can't remember which thread). That does seem to explain the issue though - RAID mode works because Windows is treating it as something different from an IDE controller, so whatever IRQ it is on doesn't matter.

justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-28, 17:00:

I had exactly the same experience with this error.

Its far as I could work out, I think it sounded like this is a consequence of Win98 expecting IDE controllers to be on specific IRQs only, so a third one on a different IRQ just won't work in the way it would in XP etc. I did briefly try disabling the secondary IDE controller but enabling the SATA in IDE mode, to see if the BIOS would reallocate the SATA controller to the standard IRQ of the secondary IDE, but it didn't seem to do that on my MSI Skt754 board. It sounded like perhaps the 'Compatibility mode' on some BIOSes would do this from the discussion I saw (can't remember which thread). That does seem to explain the issue though - RAID mode works because Windows is treating it as something different from an IDE controller, so whatever IRQ it is on doesn't matter.

I think it's memory addresses more than IRQs, but yes... I think the Via chipset exposes the 2 PATA channels + 2 SATA ports in a weird way that 98SE is very unhappy with. I think 98SE knows that they're fundamentally one chip, yet sees them as separate controllers or something...

I've seen the same threads you have - it seems that on i865/ICH5 platforms, you can have a BIOS option where effectively, it will put a SATA controller at the memory address of a traditional PATA controller to get around this issue and give 98SE what it wants. My BIOS on this Biostar doesn't have it; yours doesn't have; I am increasingly suspecting that it's a hardware feature on the ICH5 that the Via 8237+ doesn't have. And this may be yet another reason why the later LGA775 i865 boards may be the greatest retrocomputing platform ever... but... of course, they're now near unobtainium...