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Windows 9x on ASRock A785GM-LE


Tommy

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I thought at one time I posted a thread about this on here but Google hasn't been too helpful and since this is a bit of a different project, I'll go ahead and try to get some help in a new thread.

First off, the board is as listed as before. The CPU is an Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1 gig of RAM. At my disposal at the time, I had Windows Me so I went ahead and tried to install it, it installed but it had a slight glitch during the hardware detection part in setup. I did finally get it completely install and it was crazy crazy fast. It loaded the desktop so fast that I never even saw the splash screen. But this is where it gets interesting. I didn't recognize hardly anything at all. Even a PCI ethernet card from 3COM which I know has native Win9x drivers in it. Okay, so run the add new hardware wizard and have it detect your hardware. Nothing new was found. The device manager was extremely brief on what was listed. I went into My Computer. The CD ROM IDE drive was missing but the hard drive which is running on IDE emulation (SATA drive) was there and well. Well, I decided because I wanted Windows 98 anyway, I wiped the drive and installed Windows 98. I get to the third part in setup, and the monitor goes out like when you turn the computer off. I restarted and booted into safe mode. That worked and I got to the desktop. Trying normal mode again did the same thing as before, the monitor went black.

So, here's my stance. I was thinking maybe it's the southbridge that's causing issues? The funny thing is, both my mouse and keyboard are USB and those worked just fine in Me. I didn't try a flash drive and I sort of wish I did. The southbridge is an AMD SB710. Could it be that it has no drivers for it and therefor is just basically quits on me? Maybe Windows Me has something but not a lot more to at least get it to the desktop. Windows Me was able to finish setup completely whereas Windows 98 has problems after the second part of setup. What do you guys think?

Edited by Tommy
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I'm reporting back with an update. Further testing on the machine, I went ahead and reinstalled Windows Me without any addon PCI cards and it did not glitch during setup, it completed part 2 without a hitch. However, as Windows 98, Windows Me now freezes up before it starts part 3 but the screen doesn't go blank this time, it just doesn't do anything. I'm tempted to try Windows 98 with a PCI card in it and see what happens and if setup will complete completely. I'm just wondering if it's the chipset messing it up.

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You will probably need Rudolph Loes's SATA patch to get started with 98 or ME on that board.

From the readme:

The PTCHSATA.EXE file Patches the Hard Disk Driver ESDI_506.PDR to properly

support shared Interrupts and to disable Virtual Mode I/O not supported by

many SATA Controllers.

The SATA.INF file is a modified, stripped down version of the Microsoft

MSHDC.INF file.

It provides the necessary support for Motherboard Chipset SATA Controllers

that would ordinarily be confused with standard PATA Controllers.

SATA Controllers operate in NATIVE Mode when PATA Controllers are also

present. This requires a different configuration to be passed to the

ESDI_506.PDR Driver.

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Thanks for the tip, petekeller. So I've played around and gotten some results. Windows 98 still has problems, but I was able to actually get into Windows Me's normal mode after removing one of the IDE controllers from the device manager. Horrible crude method, but it actually worked. As long as I left the one alone for the CD drive which is IDE, I had CD support. I'm even more surprised that my onboard LAN works just fine under Windows Me. I maybe have to add a different sound and video card because the sound is Realtek High Defination audio but I don't exactly know which version and the graphics is ATI Radeon HD4200, which I'm sure I can whistle dixie on. I tried looking for RLoew's SATA patch demo and I couldn't find it. Maybe there never was one but I was almost positive I saw it at one point in time.

Actually, for Windows Me, I removed both IDE controllers in safe mode and setup was able to continue.

Windows 98 comes from a time when a typical PC had at most four ATA devices (two channels, two devices per channel). These were of course IDE (PATA), as SATA did not exist yet, but that is not what causes trouble. The trouble is if you have extra channels that don't satisfy W98's outdated assumptions about ports and IRQs, you get two reboots into the installation process and then it hangs. With BOOTLOG.TXT output enabled, the end of the log looks like this:

I haven't tried the bootlog.txt option, but this is indeed what happens when I try installing Windows 98 and Me both, the latter being fixable though. Maybe Rudolph Loew will have some input when he sees this? I'm so anxious and excited to get Windows 98 working. If Me can, 98 sure can! Would using Me's ESDI_506 file screw it up or would it be a crude workaround as well for the time being? There's got to be something I can do to get it going. But as I said, I cannot find anything from RLoew's site that would at least let me test it out without buying it first. I don't want to spend much money on something that might not work as there could be something else going on.

Edited by Tommy
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Okay, something else IS going on for sure. I plugged in an IDE drive that had Windows 98 installed on it and it too just hangs at the splash screen. In fact the screen goes black but if you hit any key except esc, the screen will come back on and it just says Windows 98. It's not actually frozen 100% because the lock lights on the keyboard still blink on and off if you hit their corresponding key but it just sits there while the progress bar is frozen. RLoew's RAM patch does nothing too (1GB of RAM is installed, nothing was modified to get Windows Me working with 1GB). So here's where I stand at the moment. Safe Mode works. And surprisingly my flash drive is detected in safe mode so it'll be easy to copy anything over. Does anyone have any suggestions for me on what could be going on here and where to go from here?

Edited by Tommy
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I haven't tried the bootlog.txt option, but this is indeed what happens when I try installing Windows 98 and Me both, the latter being fixable though. Maybe Rudolph Loew will have some input when he sees this? I'm so anxious and excited to get Windows 98 working. If Me can, 98 sure can! Would using Me's ESDI_506 file screw it up or would it be a crude workaround as well for the time being? There's got to be something I can do to get it going. But as I said, I cannot find anything from RLoew's site that would at least let me test it out without buying it first. I don't want to spend much money on something that might not work as there could be something else going on.

Since removing the IDE Drivers allows Windows to run in compatability mode, the problem does sound like the SATA issue unless you also have the >137GB problem.

I do not have a Demo for the SATA Patch, but I have not had a problem in any machine except one VIA based machine where I had to run it in RAID Mode.

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I haven't tried the bootlog.txt option, but this is indeed what happens when I try installing Windows 98 and Me both, the latter being fixable though. Maybe Rudolph Loew will have some input when he sees this? I'm so anxious and excited to get Windows 98 working. If Me can, 98 sure can! Would using Me's ESDI_506 file screw it up or would it be a crude workaround as well for the time being? There's got to be something I can do to get it going. But as I said, I cannot find anything from RLoew's site that would at least let me test it out without buying it first. I don't want to spend much money on something that might not work as there could be something else going on.

Since removing the IDE Drivers allows Windows to run in compatability mode, the problem does sound like the SATA issue unless you also have the >137GB problem.

I do not have a Demo for the SATA Patch, but I have not had a problem in any machine except one VIA based machine where I had to run it in RAID Mode.

Thanks for replying, both my IDE and SATA hard drives are 80GBs in size. Removing even Windows 98's IDE drivers doesn't do anything to help. Windows Me will continue setup after the drivers are removed and will work just fine. So it's mind boggling. What does Windows Me have (unmodded) that Windows 98 SE (unmodded) doesn't?

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(1GB of RAM is installed, nothing was modified to get Windows Me working with 1GB)

1GB! Did you edit the system.ini on 98SE?

Add

[vcache]

MaxFileCache=393216

This value is required to install 98SE. You can reduce or increase it up to 524288. If you are using more than 1GB you have to limit the RAM:

You also add to [386Enh]:

MaxPhysPage=48000

Important "Stickified" [Pinned] 95/98/98 SE/ME Topics => Run 9x/ME with > 1 GB RAM

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Thanks for the reply, schwups. I have added these to my system.ini file with no success. I still cannot boot into normal mode (still with IDE hard drive, no SATA at this time). Would I still need the RAM patch if I use these settings and have just 1GB of RAM?

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Windows Me was able to finish setup completely whereas Windows 98 has problems after the second part of setup. What do you guys think?

I think remove 98 and install Me from scratch to a wiped HDD (preferably real PATA IDE). Can you accomplish all that you did before? Does it finish setup and boot normally? If so, let Me there for the moment, and let's use it to diagnose the motherboard. If not, then the motherboard is degrading and should be discarded.

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Windows Me was able to finish setup completely whereas Windows 98 has problems after the second part of setup. What do you guys think?

I think remove 98 and install Me from scratch to a wiped HDD (preferably real PATA IDE). Can you accomplish all that you did before? Does it finish setup and boot normally? If so, let Me there for the moment, and let's use it to diagnose the motherboard. If not, then the motherboard is degrading and should be discarded.

I will go ahead and install Me again. I only have one IDE channel which does make it sticky so I'll try doing the CD/HDD combo which I know isn't recommended but for this situation, should work. The board shouldn't be going bad as I just bought it last year (brand new) and has mainly been in storage, but who knows. I'll go ahead and do this now and report back.

Schwups also PM'd me and gave me a few settings to try with the MaxPhysPage and I even limited it way down to 64MBs of RAM and I still have no luck with it. But I'll go ahead and see what happens with an IDE hard drive and Windows Me.

Edited by Tommy
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Okay, so I installed Windows Me on an IDE PATA hard drive and it completed setup without a hitch, no problems, no error messages, it just completed successfully and runs decent for what it has available to it. What is our next recourse now?

Edit: Had a little issue using an external PCI video card instead of onboard (which isn't compatible with 9x at all), until I loaded defaults in the BIOS, now it's working properly so it seems (still need to install the driver for it). Could something in my BIOS be messing with 98?

Edited by Tommy
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Yes it could. But more than that, look at the device manager and see what's detected, so we know what to expect on 9x. And look for yellow exclamation points, too, so we see what it doesn't like. Post a screenshot of the device manager window. Furthermore, export ENUM to a .reg file for future reference and maybe even merging it to the 9x registry, if nothing else works. And tell how much RAM does ME detect, exactly, please.

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Here's the screenshot of how much RAM it detects and the Device Manager.

The only thing I see absent is the onboard sound, which is a Realtek High Definition audio codec (ALC662 to be exact). The video card is a GeForce 4 MX 4000 PCI card that I put in.

Also, how would I go about exporting the ENUM from the registry, or moreso I should ask, under what key is it located?

post-279129-0-61487600-1394060022_thumb.

Edited by Tommy
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