delaford

Thank you. I may have to hold off on the video card just now (a baby's on the way, and there will be bills!), but the motherboard is a good price and I need this computer running. Here's to luck putting it together!

I own a Pentium 4 Cedar Mill 641 processor: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx...N82E16819116003 (click the "Specifications" tab) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel....22_.2865_nm.29 http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL94X I also own one stick of "WinTec Ampo 512 MB SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)": http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820161615 (click the "Specifications" tab) I think I've found what I've been looking for - a motherboard that will support these 2 parts AND Windows 98SE: ASRock's 775I65PE. There's a refurbished one here that lists specs: http://3btech.net/as77so77553p1.html So my questions are, looking at the specs sheets I listed above, (1) Does this motherboard, the ASRock 775I65PE, support (a) my processor (Cedar Mill 641)? (b) my RAM? (2) If my processor isn't supported, what motherboard does support both (a) my processor and (b) Windows 98SE? (3) If my RAM isn't supported, what RAM would work? Mainly I'm interested in supporting the processor (if only either CPU or RAM), since it's the most expensive of all these parts. I've also found these 2 video cards, hoping to upgrade from my old GeForce Ti-4200: http://www.provantage.com/evga-256-a8-n401-lr~7EVGA0CH.htm (GeForce 6200 256MB AGP 8x) http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...7&CatId=935 (GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB AGP 8x) (4) Will either card work with 98SE? From what I've read on these forums, yes. But some of the threads were old, and I'd like to be reasonably sure. Does either involve the "Turbo" feature some people were warning against with 98SE? Is one safer than the other? I'm trying to replace a 7-year-old computer. I'm purposely using Windows 98SE, thus the need to support it. I just want to get my computer running again. It's been 2 months of late nights, fixes, a new hard drive, and troubleshooting, and I'm done with the old computer. It has worked great, under less than optimal conditions, for years. But it's time to get something new. It crashed two months ago, then crashed three weeks later, now crashed again with an INT 24 error. I need a change. I know all advice here is non-liable. I don't want anybody's personal promise to resolve if something doesn't work; I just want to know whether these parts _should_ work together.

Wow, I don't know how I missed the word about Diskeeper. Again, I count myself fortunate to have not had problems with it until now, after years of use. Does anyone know a good disk defragmenter for use in 98SE that has a good track record? Is the BIOS battery the same as the CMOS battery? If so, I can put the one from my present (old) computer into the new one and see whether it works at all. I'll look carefully again, but I've checked all the connectors and they all look correct; I don't remember any indication of a speaker on the layout diagram in the manual. I sure would like to hear something out of it, though. I'll take my dome magnifier to the CPU socket and take a look in case I missed something when I looked last. I have wondered about a short; after years of reseating and swapping parts I've never had one but that doesn't mean it's not one now ... Having two computers can be kind of handy. I don't have a multimeter, but I can try my new power supply at running my old parts. Now, it could run those but fail to run the new ones, but I'll at least see whether it can even run the old ones. If none of what I try works, anyone have any idea of a good motherboard supporting 98SE, IDE, PCIE, DDR 400, and the processor I described?

Thanks for the quick reply: I've been running the MSFN 48-bit LBA patch for two years now with no problems, and before that I tested my system using your 48BITLBA, which found no problem, so I think this one is out. Hmm ... that's good to know about Diskeeper. That answers my question about the cause of this, then. I'm very curious how I managed to go two years without this happening, then ... I did verify the presence of the correct version of ESDI_506 at the time of this most recent instance of data corruption, and it was also present at the time of the corruption a month ago - the error occurred during normal operation, and after it crashed it simply wouldn't reboot. So now I'm simply wondering the things that I asked about my new computer parts: Does the situation with my new computer parts seem like a motherboard problem? If not, what? Does my processor support 98SE? If so, what motherboard can I buy that is compatible with (a) 98SE, (b) my processor, (c) my RAM, and (d) my IDE HDDs? It would be nice if it supported PCIE (if there are any good PCIE cards for 98SE; at present I have a 64 MB GeForce Ti4200, AGP) and SATA. Any general advice for getting the computer up and running with the new parts (processor, RAM)? Ta and thanks (particularly to rloew for the Diskeeper alert), Jonathan

I'm running an old Dell Dimension 4300, with the following changes: new RAM (came with 128 MB) new AGP (came with Rage ATI 12 MB) new soundcard (came with onboard sound) new HDDs (came with 80 GB) no idea about the processor or MBO - sorry; it's whatever came with the system (processor is 1.6 GHz) When I upgraded my HDDs 2 years ago, I had an awful time with my 320 GB (corrupted data, lots and lots) until I found out about the 128/137 GB limitation (after I RMAed the drive once, not knowing until the same thing happened to the replacement drive as well). I installed the MSFN patch and have never had a problem since. The 320 (312 GiB) was partitioned into three partitions. I am almost certain that each was less than 128 GiB, if that matters (not sure). About a month ago, I was rewriting the tags on some archived music when the memory ran very low - the system was mostly out of memory. But this isn't rare for me, after doing memory-intensive work on an old boot, with only 256 MB of RAM and 1.6 GHz in my 7-year-old machine. When I closed ZoomPlayer 2.90, I got a (memory?) error and the program didn't close correctly (as I found out later; playlist wasn't saved). I started a reboot and got a system error. I manually powered off the system using the power button. When I rebooted, I got "No OS found." Upon booting from a DOS CD, I saw that the names of directories in C:\ had been badly corrupted: names beginning with tilde or space and so forth. None were accessible. It looked like the same situation I got before I had the large HDD patch installed. But the patch was installed, so I thought the HDD must have gone bad. I moved it over to my brother's XP machine, next door (my wife and I live next to the rest of my family), and could see everything on my hard disk, except the bad directories. I believe XP "salvaged" those as .CHK or .REC files, which I've saved. I backed up all files on all partitions of all hard disks (I have two: 120 GB and 320 GB) and assumed the 320 GB drive (the boot drive) had gone bad. I ordered a new 320 GB WD (same as before) from NewEgg. When it came in, I checked the whole drive at level 2 (preventative maintenance) with SpinRite 6.0, which I bought specifically to address (and prevent) situations such as this from now on. After a day of scanning, SpinRite reported no errors found, so I partitioned the drive into a 2.5 GB partition and a 310 GB partition. With only the 120 GB drive in, I installed Windows 98SE, which I've run ever after throwing away the Me installation that came with my machine, and installed the 48-bit LBA lard HDD patch. Everything ran fine. I put the 320 GB in, and everything continued to run fine. I didn't install any other updates, because I decided I'd do some thinking beforehand and create the perfect installation, and then just back it up to use again without having to go through reinstallations in years to come. I began going through the updates, sorting them with reference to the list here in the forum. I backed up my whole installation immediately after it succeeded. Then I backed it up again with the large HDD patch installed. With a job I can't stand and a baby coming and a garden to take care of and a theology lesson to write each week, it's pretty busy around here, so I slowly went through all updates and programs saved on our machine to locate the most current version of each. Using cannie's guide to making a secondary boot partition of 98, I backed up my installation thus far (only 48-bit LBA update, plus Windows settings) to elsewhere for future recourse and then set it up in my d:\ drive with all c:\windows references changed to d:\windows. I put alternate (redirect to d and d:\windows) config.sys, msdos.sys, io.sys in my c:\ drive - not replacing the ones needed to boot into c:\ but renamed so that using a boot CD I can swap files back and forth to boot into either c:\ or d:\ with no hassle. This worked fine. Even though I was still doing setup and planning my perfect install, it's nice to have the computer usable, so I installed the essentials (sound, AGP, modem, DirectX, Microsoft Word 2000, MSFN shell32 fix for hangs after involved file operations) on what was now a temporary installation for use only until I had finished planning out the final install, at which point I would revert to the nearly-clean install (that having only large HDD support and Windows settings changes) and build the final install from there. Because my wife and I e-mail each other when I'm at work during the day, I installed Juno (we don't have Internet access, although we'll be getting it as soon as I get the machine up and running and finish going through all the updates to get the machine in the most optimum state; instead, Juno dials up to a central server long enough to deposit and retrieve e-mails). I got all the most current updates from MSFN, but as I say, I had yet to install any except pretty much just those noted. During the next couple weeks, I sorted through stuff, and we just used our computer as usual. My wife missed a few of the shortcuts I had put in before the computer died; I missed them all, and was completely out of my environment. With my computer running the way I want it to, it's not much less than an extension of myself, with everything right at my fingertips, only a keypress away. Then, after a hard week typing that week's lesson, I burned all last Saturday forcing myself to write out something. It took me quite a while, but it was worth it. We got back from my youngest brother's and sister's graduation party, and my lesson was still up. Instead of finishing it, I put off the last little bit and played Deus Ex until 2:00. When I shut the game down, I picked up the last little bit of the lesson to finish it. I made a change to my Word document and, when I paused for a moment to think, told it to save, but I got a (paraphrasing here) "Saved failed due to file permission error." I figured the computer's RAM had run so low that I needed to reboot, so I just closed it and figured I'd open it right back up. When I closed it, however, a retrieved version of the document was up behind it, so I closed that, and when it asked whether I wanted to save, I saved again, only to get the same error. At this point, I should have copied the contents of the entire document to the clipboard, but that didn't occur to me. I closed the unsavable document without saving and tried to open it right back up. But the document was gone. In fact, the folder it was in was entirely empty of all the other things in it, including the RARed backup of the lessons I had made that afternoon. I searched the computer for the file and got nothing, and then searched it for the *.tmp files and got nothing, either. Because I had just had all my files on my brother's computer, I had all the lessons up through what I'd just written that week. I wasn't happy to lose what I'd slaved all week on, but everything else was saved. But the computer's doing it again? And with the drive I checked out with SpinRite (not that that's a cloak of armor, or anything, but hey)? We hadn't changed or added a lot of files from what was (is) backed up on my brother's computer, so I started looking for what we had in an attempt to save it before it was lost in a future losing moment. So what was new? What was irreplaceable? Three weeks' worth of e-mails downloaded to our computer and sent from it, as well as - get this - the RAR backup I'd made of our Juno folder three days before. As it turns out, I also lost the Deus Ex savegame I'd just created. Thankfully the second most recent save (not very long before, somewhere in UNATCO holding rather than stepping out of MJ-12 Hong Kong into Wan Chai market) is (I think) okay. Numerous other files (none new, and so okay to lose) were lost. I found many of them (I presume) moved into a "nearby" folder, all with unprintable and illegal characters in their names, with folders inaccessible and files "totaling" (in that location alone) 4.32 TB. So was it the new hard drive? I wondered, but after thinking I thought not. It looks as if the FAT is bad, but TestDisk says it looks okay. It looks like the same as sort of corruption I got when I didn't have the 48-bit LBA patch installed, but I checked, and it was. Furthermore, I can see the rest of the computer's contents fine - no "MS-DOS virtual compatibility mode" or whatever it says when a drive exceeds the old ESDI_506 barrier. And I have continued to see it fine. All new or changed files I could retrieve are now backed up with the earlier backups on my brother's computer, and I'm trying to sort things out. By the way, I got the lesson back a couple days ago, after I taught it from memory the day after the second crash. I didn't get back the Word file proper, but I got into the document and both *.tmp files. None of them could be retrieved as complete and undamaged Word files, but I was able to access and copy the text of my additions, which I can easily add back into the earlier good copy of my document that is missing only those changes. Numerous other new files I (think I) was able to retrieve; at least, I successfully copied them from the bad drive to the second partition on the master drive (the 120, this time around). Our Juno installation, unfortunately, I was not able to retrieve. Neither was I able to retrieve the most recent Juno RAR backup. My one best friend who e-mails me I can have re-send me all his and my e-mails, but I can't get back the ones I sent my wife from work, or the ones she sent me from home. I wish I could; our first anniversary is tomorrow but I would like to have them forever. But three weeks isn't terrible, in a broader view of things. So I'm wondering: is the motherboard bad? perhaps the RAM? I have two sticks of RAM, both 256 (the MBO has two slots, but one slot is damaged and won't hold a stick), but I'd rather not try running one and then the other until I am able to successfully replicate my loss of all my important material. But there's another possibility, although I can't understand it. I think I remember running Diskeeper Lite briefly while rewriting tags on that archived music right (moments) before the first crash. And I know I did run Diskeeper Lite earlier during the day when I wrote the lesson, played Deus Ex, and lost everything that counted. The computer was on all day; no reboots. Both times, I stopped Diskeeper partway through, because it was slowing down what I was doing. It makes sense to me that this could be what caused file corruption that appears like the corruption caused when trying to use a large hard drive without that capability installed. And it certainly explains why the newer (newest) files were the ones that were corrupted - I presume that they were the ones first accessed by Diskeeper. At the very least the relation of their chronological characteristics makes this a very suspect case of corruption, I think. But I've run Diskeeper many, many times before, always on this machine and on the old install I had used for years until it crashed at the end of last month. If Diskeeper, why this time? I've stopped Diskeeper partway through on numerous occasions and have never had anything like this happen. But I thought perhaps it's time to upgrade my hardware, though not my OS. Actually, I thought this a year-and-a-half ago, and here's what I got back then from NewEgg, based on Rjecina's list of modern motherboards compatible with 98SE: ASRock 775i65G LGA 775 Intel 865G Micro ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Pentium 4 641 Cedar Mill 3.2GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T Processor http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16811156074 WINTEC AMPO 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory When the parts came, I tried putting them together. I see now, reading descriptions on the net, that I should have built them on a table first before trying them in the case. I didn't. The power supply worked, and then very soon after didn't, and wouldn't. I figured I'd need to get a new one but put it off. Consequently I put off getting the rest of the parts working. I should point out that even when all the parts were working, briefly, the computer wouldn't actually run. Now I'm trying to get those same parts running, and I'm having better luck. I pulled them out again about a month-and-a-half ago to take a look, because I want them to work. The computer will be more than twice as good as it is now, at everything (well, I need a new AGP card), if I get them running. (In fact, it was after moving some of the hardware to the newer computer that the drive went bad a month ago. Note that the second drive failure (on the new drive I RMAed yesterday, just in case) was, however, on my old hardware.) When I set the parts up again, it ran. Then it wouldn't. Clearly the power supply wasn't dead dead, so I nudged stuff, and then it worked again. By "work", I mean "fans and HDDs will power up, but nothing more". I discovered that if it wasn't working, and even when the power strip was disconnected, if I put pressure on the MBO in certain places, some "lost" power would be released and the fans would kick on for a moment. I wondered whether things might be too tight, so I loosened one of the screws holding the MBO to the case, and everything worked fine and has since. I since found that too tight a connection to the case can cause a short that keeps things from powering up. Last night, after backing up all new stuff I could and playing the Diablo 2 demo to psyche myself up (finally rediscovered it after a friend introduced me to it years ago and am looking forward to getting the battle chest), I tried to get my new parts working. I put the power supply and motherboard on a wooden tabletop, connected. I put my monitor (CRT) on a chair beside, connected. And the same thing happened as the month before, and the year before: fans power on, HDD (if I had had one installed last night) power on, but nothing else. No monitor static, no monitor display, no beeps, no nothing. I took out the RAM; still no beeps. It wasn't a video card problem - I was using onboard video for starters. But AGP didn't work when I tried that. I took out the processor, even. No beeps. The motherboard supports powering everything on, but won't POST, and I don't know why. I reseated the processor, same results. I'm inclined to think that the motherboard is the problem. Does this seem a supportable assumption? That means I just bought a new 320 GB HDD (to supplement my other 320, which doesn't seem to have itself been bad after all) for nothing, but at least I'll have ... um, a lot of space. I'd try the parts in my old MBO, but it won't handle the RAM or the processor, so no go there. The monitor works fine in my old hardware. I am for certain switching to new hardware. I would very much like to keep the processor, because it cost more than the ASRock MBO I bought. I notice in Rjecina's 98SE-compatible motherboards post that the 775i65G is listed as What does "intel865" mean? Does it mean that my "Intel Pentium 4 641 Cedar Mill 3.2GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T Processor" won't work? The processor box says "Processor 641+" on the box, but I'm not sure what that means and I checked very carefully on Intel's site to get a processor I thought I was certain would work with the motherboard. Will this processor work with any motherboard that is compatible with 98SE? Here's basically what I'm trying to do: I'm still going to run 98SE. I'd like to keep my processor, because it cost a lot. I'd like to keep my IDE drives (especially since I just bought a new one for $70!), although I'd like to have SATA capability, too, if possible, as my new (and bad?) current ASRock has. I'm not tied to AGP; if there's a PCIE video card that works with 98SE, I'll get it. I'd like to keep my "WINTEC AMPO 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory", if possible. After all, I bought it. So my questions, for my old computer parts: What do the hard drive corruption problems sound like? Diskeeper? Motherboard? RAM? Processor? Drives themselves? And my questions, for my new computer parts: Does this seem like a motherboard problem? If not, what? Does my processor support 98SE? If so, what motherboard can I buy that is compatible with (a) 98SE, (b) my processor, © my RAM, and (d) my IDE HDDs. It would be nice if it supported PCIE (if there are any good PCIE cards for 98SE; at present I have a 64 MB GeForce Ti4200, AGP) and SATA. Any general advice for getting the computer up and running with the new parts (processor, RAM)? I don't know quite enough about hardware to know exactly what my hardware should be doing, and how compatible it is, or why it might not be. I just tried to find stuff that I thought said were compatible with each other. By the way, on the box of my processor, it says: The sticker on the box says: Is support for "64-bit computing" bad? I'm looking forward to trying to put at least a gig of RAM in, myself - I've wistfully watched the guides here on the forum for some time - but I'd just like to get this stuff running first. As I said, it will be more than twice as good, in every way, as the stuff I'm using now. On the bright side, I got both Fallouts and both Baldur's Gates (with expansions) in the mail yesterday and today, so when things are back in order, I'll be having some fun. It looks as if fans have fixed almost everything left to be fixed with those games. And we'll be getting the net at home, at long last, so things are looking good. It's just this small bit of the present that is somewhat frustrating. I'm grateful to have these forums. It's rare to find a place where people know so much about a specialized situation (98SE in today's age) and don't merely advise OS upgrades. I don't always have great Internet access (I have to go next door to use it, now), so if you have any suggestions, I'm available at my username, at my e-mail provider specified above. But I'll be checking these forums, too. Grateful for MSFN, Jonathan

Thank you for all the replies. It sounds like DSL could work well for us, then. Am I correct in assuming that nowadays if I own a NIC any DSL connection could be routed into my computer by plugging the DSL modem my computer's NIC? The moment I heard "USB connection" I felt a sinking feeling inside me.

I notice that most DSL companies have system requirements, and I'm not surprised to see that they start with XP and up. What's the sysrq for? I assume drivers for the hardware, but I don't believe for a second that people running SE can't use high-speed Internet. I think I'd "like" to use Verizon - at least, they have our phone already and their deal looks best. I've heard bad things, though (more often in the past), so if they're not a good choice, warn me! I am curious who is a good DSL provider, but I'm really asking - what DSL can I get, say $20/month, about 1.0mbps/400k to 1.5/500, that will work with 98SE? I suspect that any will, but I'd like to be sure. A baby's coming, and I'd like to be working from home by November, thus the switch to modern Internet at long last. Is anyone using Verizon DSL with 98SE?