Windows 98SE and Serial ATA

[andreainside]

Hi to everybody . sorry for my first post to be a help request,

I need to run Windows 98 S.E. on a Sata disk, connected to the SATA-0 port of a VIA VT6421a controller (i know that, like the 90% of chips made by via, it is not the best thing on the market, but for only 15€ you can't have much)

This controller have drivers for windows 98, but i don't think the setup can accept them with something like NT's F6 floppy, so fdisk & co. only see the IDE disks connected on the motherboard and the ones connected to the IDE channel on the VIA controller.

However, since DOS/Windows 9x boots on almost every controller, i thought "nevermind, i'll just install it on a ide disk, install the via drivers and then use acronis or dd to clone the install on the sata disk". But I've thought wrong: it hangs after the motherboard BIOS has loaded the controller bios, just after the second screen of an award bios post (where there is a table that makes a simple list of the hardware, the bios lists all the used IRQs and check the cdrom drive for a bootable media). the bios is set to boot from CDROM, SCSI, A

sorry for how badly this post is written, but english is not my first language

System configuration:

Pentium III 450

QDI Advance 5/133e Motherboard (VIA Apollo Pro 693a Chipset)

Geforce2 MX400 64MB Graphics

320 Megs of PC-100 RAM

VIA VT6421a IDE/SATA Controller

Cheap 48x CDROM (Primary Master on Motherboard)

WD 160GB SATA Drive (SATA-0 on via controller)

a 10GB Maxtor ATA66 drive was also used for the installation i tried to clone, it was IDE-0 Master on the controller

[dencorso]

Get RLoew's SATA patch and inf (see RLoew's Software Homepage). Its your best bet (though it's not for free). Then again, it was designed with motherboard controllers in mind, it may not be enough. Why not simply use an IDE HDD partition for booting and move whatever you have on IDE to SATA? It's simpler and time-proven.

[andreainside]

Get RLoew's SATA patch and inf (see RLoew's Software Homepage). Its your best bet (though it's not for free). Then again, it was designed with motherboard controllers in mind, it may not be enough. Why not simply use an IDE HDD partition for booting and move whatever you have on IDE to SATA? It's simpler and time-proven.

Yes, this might be the easiest way. Even better, maybe I've found an 80GB IDE drive for a bargain price, more than enough space for my needs on that machine and even better than having a 10-years-old noisy (and probably dying, smart data are not that good) boot drive and another one just for data.

Thanks for the time time you've lost trying to help me.

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

I need to run Windows 98 S.E. on a Sata disk, connected to the SATA-0 port of a VIA VT6421a controller (i know that, like the 90% of chips made by via, it is not the best thing on the market, but for only 15€ you can't have much)

This controller have drivers for windows 98, but i don't think the setup can accept them with something like NT's F6 floppy, so fdisk & co. only see the IDE disks connected on the motherboard and the ones connected to the IDE channel on the VIA controller.

You will not need any third-party driver. You will not need Rloew's patch.

When you install Win-98 on a system that has a SATA drive, you will first set the SATA mode in the motherboard bios. You will set it to SATA or RAID mode. *DO NOT* set it to IDE / Compatibility mode.

Then boot a floppy that's been formatted using win-98 and that includes the typical system files (format, fdisk). Run Fdisk and partition the SATA drive, then run format and format the drive. The format.com that you use should have a file-date of May 2000. Use the format /s to make the drive bootable. When you're finished, the system should be able to boot off the hard drive directly into DOS. Copy other files (like himem.sys, smartdrv.exe, mscdex.exe, emm386.exe) onto the hard drive and construct your autoexec.bat and config.sys files accordingly. When all that is done, you should have DOS access to your CD drive. At that point, insert your win-98 CD and install Windows 98.

Now after windows has been installed, and after you've installed the drivers for the motherboard and video card, you will install the drivers for the SATA controller (or - that might be done as part of the motherboard driver installation). If you've set the SATA mode correctly in the bios, your SATA controller should be detected as a "SCSI" controller by win-98 (or - it will appear as a SCSI controller in Device Manager).

Until the system has the sata drivers installed, win-98 will be accessing the drive in DOS-compatible mode (ie - using BIOS int13 routines). This will be a slower way to access the drive, but it is a valid way to access it and no harm will be done by it.

NT-based operating systems are not capable of accessing SATA drives using BIOS int13 calls, so it is required that you feed them the SATA driver during installation, or you set the SATA controller to IDE-compatible mode in the bios before you start the installation. Operating systems like Vista and / or Seven probably have SATA drivers built into them. Windows NT, 2000 and XP did not have them.

[andreainside]

the problem is that the controller is a PCI card, and the only settings in its bios are for creating some kind of a soft-raid array

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

the problem is that the controller is a PCI card, and the only settings in its bios are for creating some kind of a soft-raid array

That's ok. Select that option. That will probably force it into SATA mode and out of IDE-compatibility mode. You can't do raid with only 1 physical drive.

According to the specs for your SATA controller chip:

----------

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/peripherals/serial-ata_raid/vt6421/

The VIA VT6421 features two Serial ATA channels, supporting up to two devices and one Parallel ATA channel supporting two devices. Featuring PCMCIA interface, the Cardbus mode supports up to two Serial ATA devices. With dual channel Serial ATA, the VIA VT6421 delivers 12% more bandwidth than ATA-133 for data transfer between storage devices and CPU, bursting up to 150Mbps of data per channel and offering a significant performance improvement in data intensive and bulk storage application.

The VIA VT6421 provides multilevel RAID support including RAID level 0 for maximum performance, RAID Level 1 for maximum security and JBOD. To ensure backwards compatibility the VIA VT6421 also integrates a single channel parallel ATA-133 controller, eliminating the need for adaptors.

-----------

If I read that correctly, your controller card might have both SATA and PATA (IDE) connectors on it. Does it? If so, the drivers you have might also come with an LBA-48 driver that overcomes the problem with Microsoft's native IDE driver (esdi_506.pdr). Such a driver would be a complete substitute for Rlowe's driver, and it would allow you to use your SATA drive in any mode (SATA or IDE compatible), and it would allow you to connect any size IDE hard drive to your system.

Also note:

You have a 160 gb SATA drive. If you use fdisk to create a single 120 gb partition and leave the remaining space unused, then you will be OK regardless if your SATA controller is using SATA mode or IDE-compatible mode.

Edited July 22, 2010 by wsxedcrfv

[andreainside]

That's ok. Select that option. That will probably force it into SATA mode and out of IDE-compatibility mode. You can't do raid with only 1 physical drive.

what option? having only 1 drive i can't do anything at all, apart from pressing esc to quit setup

well, even if via said that, my controller is a pci card, not a cardbus one.

and yes, the controller has both sata (2 ch.) and ide (1 ch.) and i don't think the problem is lba48, 'cause windows was cloned (and later tried to install) on a 30 gigs partition (which fdisk said to be a 30,20 MB partition, but maybe this is due to an ancient version (the one included in an original bootable 98se compact disk, so can't install the fdisk update patch and then recreate the bootdisk)

Edited July 22, 2010 by andreainside

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

what option? having only 1 drive i can't do anything at all, apart from pressing esc to quit setup

That's ok. According to your picture, the drive is in SATA mode. It's just telling you that you can't create a raid set - but that's ok.

well, even if via said that, my controller is a pci card, not a cardbus one.

That's not the point. Yes we know it's a PCI card. The chip itself supports cardbus.

and yes, the controller has both sata (2 ch.) and ide (1 ch.) and i don't think the problem is lba48, 'cause windows was cloned (and later tried to install) on a 30 gigs partition (which fdisk said to be a 30,20 MB partition, but maybe this is due to an ancient version (the one included in an original bootable 98se compact disk, so can't install the fdisk update patch and then recreate the bootdisk)

Ok, more info is required.

What state was that 160 gb drive in when you connected it to that motherboard / controller card? Did it already have an OS installed on it? Was it 98 or something else? Was it cloned from something else?

You WILL have an LBA-48 problem if you want to use that entire drive under windows 98 AND the controller is set in the bios to be in IDE-compatibility mode. The lba-48 problem will not be because of the drive or the controller or the motherboard - it will be because of Win-98's native IDE driver (ESDI_506.pdr). If Windows-98 is using it's native IDE driver to access ANY IDE drive, that drive must be physically smaller than 128 gb. Doesn't matter how it's partitioned. Only the first 128 gb of any IDE drive is usable under win-98. You must not create any partitions or volumes on an IDE drive that in total reach over the 128 gb point on the drive or use more than the first 128 gb.

Again, this is for IDE drives or for SATA drives that appear to the system as IDE drives because that's how they are configured in the bios. In both cases, Win-98 will be using it's native IDE driver to access those drives.

If the SATA controller is told to NOT show a SATA drive as an IDE drive, then Win-98 will ask you for a SATA driver or it will use DOS-compatibility mode to access the drive (which is slower, but it will work). But there will be no problem using large SATA drives (larger than 128 gb) in that case.

[andreainside]

What state was that 160 gb drive in when you connected it to that motherboard / controller card? Did it already have an OS installed on it? Was it 98 or something else? Was it cloned from something else?

it was zeroed (connected to my main machine, then dd=if/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd) tried cloning a working 98 install. then zeroed again, used gparted to make a 30GB partition. formatted with mkfs.vfat. so now the hard drive has an empty fat32 30gb partiton.

You WILL have an LBA-48 problem if you want to use that entire drive under windows 98 AND the controller is set in the bios to be in IDE-compatibility mode. The lba-48 problem will not be because of the drive or the controller or the motherboard - it will be because of Win-98's native IDE driver (ESDI_506.pdr). If Windows-98 is using it's native IDE driver to access ANY IDE drive, that drive must be physically smaller than 128 gb. Doesn't matter how it's partitioned. Only the first 128 gb of any IDE drive is usable under win-98. You must not create any partitions or volumes on an IDE drive that in total reach over the 128 gb point on the drive or use more than the first 128 gb.

the install i've tried to clone had both

- controller's driver installed

- was on a partition smaller than 128 gb

and the controller was set to be in SATA mode, since it completely lacks any configuration about this

Again, this is for IDE drives or for SATA drives that appear to the system as IDE drives because that's how they are configured in the bios. In both cases, Win-98 will be using it's native IDE driver to access those drives.

If the SATA controller is told to NOT show a SATA drive as an IDE drive, then Win-98 will ask you for a SATA driver or it will use DOS-compatibility mode to access the drive (which is slower, but it will work). But there will be no problem using large SATA drives (larger than 128 gb) in that case.

i've always thought that win98 had more gremlins than the electronics on a FIAT car, however i'll try to sort them out tomorrow, as here is 04:00 AM and i'm dead tired.

for the moment i don't mind having dos compatibility drivers, as long as i can make it boot.

[dencorso]

Well, since your card is set to SATA mode, and apparently cannot be reconfigured for IDE-compatible mode (which is usual for those VIA controllers), I take back what I said before: RLoew's patch won't be of any help to you, because it requires the controller to be in IDE-compatible mode to work.

Then again, wsxedcrfv is right: you actually don't need RLoew's patch, because there is a good VIA driver for the card.

The correct VIA SATA driver to use is this one:

SerialATA_V220E.zip (direct download)

Anything newer, despite VIA claiming they support 9x/ME, in fact do not work right. Good luck!

[andreainside]

Well, since your card is set to SATA mode, and apparently cannot be reconfigured for IDE-compatible mode (which is usual for those VIA controllers), I take back what I said before: RLoew's patch won't be of any help to you, because it requires the controller to be in IDE-compatible mode to work.

Then again, wsxedcrfv is right: you actually don't need RLoew's patch, because there is a good VIA driver for the card.

The correct VIA SATA driver to use is this one:

SerialATA_V220E.zip (direct download)

Anything newer, despite VIA claiming they support 9x/ME, in fact do not work right. Good luck!

thanks, in fact i had drivers v550b, claimed to be drivers for both sata and ide and compatible from dos to windows 7 amd64. i'll give these a try

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

Most of what I wrote is more applicable for someone that is installing win-98 from scratch on a virgin SATA drive.

Working with cloned drives and transplanting those drives from one PC to another is always going to be problematic, regardless if it's win-98 or 2K, XP, etc. You are saying that you had a win-98 drive that you cloned to this 160 gb SATA drive (if I'm reading this correctly). Was the original drive connected to this QDI motherboard originally? Can you not find another IDE drive to use as the destination drive for the cloning?

[andreainside]

Most of what I wrote is more applicable for someone that is installing win-98 from scratch on a virgin SATA drive.

Working with cloned drives and transplanting those drives from one PC to another is always going to be problematic, regardless if it's win-98 or 2K, XP, etc. You are saying that you had a win-98 drive that you cloned to this 160 gb SATA drive (if I'm reading this correctly). Was the original drive connected to this QDI motherboard originally? Can you not find another IDE drive to use as the destination drive for the cloning?

the ide drive was connected to the ide channel on the VIA

after doing many experiments, i think that the best thing i can do at the moment is to zero all the drives and then start from scratch (aka: installing on the ide, then trying the 2.20 drivers)

Edited July 22, 2010 by andreainside

[rloew]

Well, since your card is set to SATA mode, and apparently cannot be reconfigured for IDE-compatible mode (which is usual for those VIA controllers), I take back what I said before: RLoew's patch won't be of any help to you, because it requires the controller to be in IDE-compatible mode to work.

Then again, wsxedcrfv is right: you actually don't need RLoew's patch, because there is a good VIA driver for the card.

The correct VIA SATA driver to use is this one:

SerialATA_V220E.zip (direct download)

Anything newer, despite VIA claiming they support 9x/ME, in fact do not work right. Good luck!

The SATA Patch I normally distribute is designed only for Native (IDE) Mode SATA Controllers. I have other versions for the other three modes.

These can be used for Cards that do not have Windows 98 Drivers such as the JMicron Cards.

But I've thought wrong: it hangs after the motherboard BIOS has loaded the controller bios, just after the second screen of an award bios post (where there is a table that makes a simple list of the hardware, the bios lists all the used IRQs and check the cdrom drive for a bootable media). the bios is set to boot from CDROM, SCSI, A

I did not suggest my SATA Patch, when this thread started, because the above quote implies that the Computer was freezing during bootup long before the Drivers would be loaded.

Edited July 22, 2010 by rloew

[dencorso]

@RLoew: I hadn't paid attention to that critical detail. You're right, for sure.

I see from the pic that the present 6241 SATA BIOS is v. 4.31

I suggest a BIOS downgrade: either to v. 2.31 (for the 6420, so not 100% guaranteed to work); it is available in the same package that I offered a link to in an earlier post, and the right file to use would be 6420R230.rom... or, an even better choice is here (for BIOS downgrade only, see NOTE, below), the relevant file being 6421Vxxx.rom, which is 6241 SATA BIOS v. 1.20. Of course, it's highly recommendable to backup the present BIOS, before downgrading, just in case. Another option would be upgrading, after backup, to the latest existing BIOS version.

@andreainside: Both options may work. Both are somewhat risky. Don't do anything because I said so. If you decide do it, go ahead it if, and only if, you yourself consider it's an idea worthy trying. YMMV. Explore your card manufacturer's site and see whether they offer BIOS upgrades/downgrades and get their BIOS flasher... it's safer to use the card manufacturer's bios than VIA's reference BIOSes for add-on cards.

=======

NOTE: In fact the SATA driver it contains is too new, because it only contains VIAMRAID.SYS, which you do not want... what you want instead is VIASRAID.MPD, which exists in the other download I pointed to earlier.