Windows 98 chipset driver installation fails with reboot

[Sweeper]

I have assembled an old Socket A rig for some classic Win 98 retro gaming as I got a few titles that doesn't want to be installed or run under XP.

Regardless here is the hardware specs:

AMD Athlon XP Mobile CPU running at stock frequency

DFI LanParty nForce 2 Ultra B motherboard

512Mb of PC 3200 DDR memory (2x 256Mb sticks)

Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 128Mb.

Harddrives I got 1x old 6Gb that is presently unplugged, and 1x 80Gb Maxtor, both are IDE drives naturally and resides on the same channel.

And 1x Optical DVD Drive on the 2nd IDE channel.

Basically, the install of Win 98 goes fine, which is Windows 98 SE by the way, problems start once that is complete and I try to install the chipset drivers, amongst them the drivers for the nForce ethernet controller that I need to access files on my regular Win XP rig.

However each time I try to install this nForce driver package for Windows the computer reboots, either during ethernet install OR during Windows Audio which I guess is related to SoundStorm with the Realtek codec.

So far I have tried: Disabling IE1394 controller

Disabling the SATA controller since it is not in use.

Disabling the Realtek Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Removing 1 stick of RAM to drop the memory to 256 in a hope that was the problem.

Still unresolved, any ideas how to get this thing rolling?

[starcraftmaster]

you did make sure its the right drivers yer? and their for windows 98 SE

[starcraftmaster]

you did make sure its the right drivers yer? and their for windows 98 SE

[Kwibus]

You could try to install the drivers without using the installer programs.

I do not have an win98 machine here but

i think you should select your network card under the system icon in the config panel.

Then select update driver and select the folder containing the appropriate .inf file rom the folder where you have put the driver files.

If there are no .inf files there the installer probably is a self extracting file.

In that case there should be a folder containing the driver files in the windows/Temp directory.

(If you can not find the right folder just remove all of the folders from the windows/temp directory and rerun the installer. after an installer finishes it should remove the folder but if yours crashes it probably is still there. If an application does finish normally but you want to view the files: press control alt delete to terminate the aplication before it deletes the files from the windows Temp folder)

I hope this is usefull for you.

good luck

[Sweeper]

I will give that a shot.

The drivers should be correct however, it is an Nvidia nForce archive for Win 98 taken from the DFI webpage, however they had several weird options.

I have messed around with nForce before but never seen such a vast choice of options for download, regardless the drivers should be unified.

Install wise the extracting archive puts the installer on C: with the driver files, I just found it strange that it refused to work with the installer, for the audio it would be neat to have the SoundStorm control panel, but I guess you can't have everything.

[Drugwash]

Try downloading generic nForce2 drivers from the nVidia site, maybe those will work. See if you can get older versions too (check the beta/archived link).