halohalo

On some boards(ex: GA-K8A480M-9) , there is no PATA compatible mode for SATA controller in BIOS. So ESDI_506.PDR does not work on SATA HDD, and you can't see SATA HDD in device manager. Besides, SATA HDD will be forced to work at MS-DOS compatibility mode.

I only have X850XT PCI-E and X800pro AGP(R420), so my experience may not work for you. When I installed CATALYST 6.2 for X850XT PCI-E on GA-K8A480M-9(ATI RS480 + Uli M1573), manually update resulted in an installation failure after reboot, just like what you encountered. I tried to install the driver by running Setup.exe in subfolder "6-2_wme_dd_cp_30314\Driver", and I failed again. Finally I let CATALYST 6.2 handle the installation and completed without any problem. I need to install CATALYST 6.2 first before downgrading driver. If I install CATALYST 5 directly, an error message appears when entering Win98se normal mode, and Win98se stops working. I also use X800pro AGP(R420), but it works well with CATALYST 4.11~6.2. Compared with X800pro AGP(R420), the installation of X850XT PCI-E is troublesome Besides, ATI supports R481 since CATALYST 6.2, and R480 since CATALYST 5.2. That means X850XT AGP may have more unknown compatibility problems than PCI-E ones.

Uli USB 2.0 driver works on GA-K8U-939(M1689 chipset). Since NVIDIA acquires Uli, I guess they will never fix the USB 2.0 problem for Win9x/me

Original Audigy 2 has both VXD and WDM driver for Win9x/me. You can find the driver from its' driver cd, not from CREATIVE official site. According to the statement from CREATIVE, even Audigy 2 ZS supports Win9x/me, but I don't know if there is any VXD driver for Audigy 2 ZS, since VXD driver is stable than WDM driver. However, not all products of Audigy series support Win9x/me. For example, Audigy4, Audigy 2 ZS notebook and Audigy Value(Audigy SE) do not support Win9x/me. I guess new X-Fi series should not be able to support Win9x/me. Anyway, it is necessary to check the package first for the statement about Win9x/me support.

Both AGP and PCI-E cards are supported. I built a new pc with Opteron 154. X850XT, Audigy2, and GA-K8A480M-9(ATI RS480 + Uli M1573), it is surprising that X850XT works without major problem. X800pro AGP works with older CATALYST, but it is necessary to install CATALYST 6.2 for X850XT PCI-E before downgrading driver. However, Uli M1573 does not support SATA, because Uli didn't complete win98/me driver for M1573 (M5287 SATA Controller). Besides, all USB devices(floppy, flash disk) disappear after installing Uli USB 2.0 driver. Switching to Orangeware driver and USB 2.0 devices disappear, so finally I gave up