Poss new system box

[ews]

Hi all.

New poster here, re a suggeston to visit site via Micro Mart magazine reader, after seeking info re Win98 and how to upgrade.

Firstly, knowledge not great, a computer/system box is just electronic lego bricks to me, Plug + Play scenario, when95/ 98 was current I seemed to be with it all, but today I am floundering, left behind with the rush to faster (?) better O/S's (?) and hardware.

I am looking to upgrade from my AMD500 K6-2 set up, still okay but wish to use it only as a net use box, so I am hoping to build another box for other uses, dual boot Win98SE with Xandros (Linux). Will Win 98SE have problems with dual booting ???. I plan to use both box,s via a KVM switch.

I have available a Epox EP-8RDA+3 Motherboard, (complete with drivers disk, 'nVidia Windows XP/200/9X aForce drivers' a AMD 3200 Athlon CPU , 512 mb, DDR-400Mz PC3200 RAM and a'nVidia' FX5500/256mb/DDR display card (complete with drivers disc). This was a ex Win XP set that I have been given,as user was updating.

So the question is will this new (?) hardware be compatible with Win98SE or are their issue's that I might have to address, will it work at all ?. Comments are invited.

[Chozo4]

Judging from the hardware given, that setup should run just perfectly fine. I run EPoX boards myself and they've been rock solid and 98 drivers still supplied up through the NForce 3U series. The Nvidia is more than supported without problems as well and works well in tandem with an NForce chipset.

Would suggest updating all available dirvers however once you set it up. Drivers provided on installation disks provided with the hardware are typically rather outdated.

Only thing you *might* have troubles with is configurable through the BIOS (usually press F1 or DEL to get into setup during memory check). Having both IDE channels running and SATA channels running will cause problems upon driver assignment as they both try to assign under the same parent (OS yells at you and blue-screens with a system halted to prevent issues). So, in the bios, if NOT using any SATA drives, it is best to select the On-Board SATA controller setting and set to DISABLE.

[Likely not to apply to your needs so, don't let it confuse you]

However, they would both work if your BIOS had an option to set the SATA controller to emulate itself as an additional IDE controller. Another workaround should you need both IDE and SATA together which I had thought of recently which could work is to run the IDE or SATA drives in MSDOS compatibility mode to avoid conflicts in windows and thus only end up with only one of the controllers loaded with 32-bit drivers.

[/end]

Links to drivers:

EPOX: http://www.epox.com.tw/eng/support.php?ps=230&type=2

NVIDIA:

---Mainboard chipset http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_win9x_4.27.html

---Graphics Card http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_81.98.html

As far as dual-booting linux, I am not sure which install method would be recommended for your flavour of linux. So, best to check the installation documentation for it first before setting it up for dual boot. Many a time you'll need to setup more than 1 partition to run both, meaning using 'fdisk' in dos mode to split up the drive into 'slices'.

I have trouble trying to explain things dead simple at first so, I apologize if any of this has confused you any. Wish you luck setting up your new system.

Edited March 22, 2008 by Chozo4