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dell inspiron 1000 with 98SE, setup switches, etc


cov3rt

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i have just finished experimenting with the dell inspiron 1000 laptop on 98SE and i was not able to get it work properly. this particular laptop requires extensive work in order to possibly get it working properly, i was not able to achieve this so far. i think the laptop uses the sis 961 southbridge chipsets? normal setup will not continue, running "setup /p i" does not work either, i had to use "setup /p b" and i had to click no for detection of system bus, i pressed yes to all other devices in the prompt mode and setup was able to successfully install.

however, upon booting to desktop and viewing device manager, several devices of course were missing in device manager such as all the other devices such as pci ethernet controller, pci card, etc. i went ahead and updated the system all the way till the chipset driver part, excluding other stuff like usb, etc. trying to add new hardware listed ACPI as available, although trying to install this caused system hang on reboot, removing it from safe mode allowed to reboot successfully without it trying to keep reinstalling. 

i tried to research further solutions and came up with an update online as preventing ACPI from being detected / installed on dell systems for 98, i applied it with the name "runmea01", rebooted system, then tried add new hardware again, next, next, yes, and in the details list, it showed advanced power management support and plug and play bios instead of ACPI, although i already had advanced power management support, i installed both and clicked finish. 

upon reboot, 98SE detected several new devices and successfully installed them until PCI bus in which it froze the system. rebooting went straight to PCI bus again and same problem. i went into safe mode and it showed all the new devices, i do not have the pics, though i'll see if i can upload the earlier ones before detection of newer ones, i tried to change some stuff here in there in device manager in safe mode, rebooted but still faced with the PCI bus problem, it became too much for me to keep fiddling with or find a fix or solutions to all the problems so i stopped there. 

so i was wondering if there can be a solution to this if i were to experiment again on this laptop or another system with similar problems, i was thinking that maybe if i installed the "runmea01" update and then tried to manually add the PCI bus before adding new devices that windows automatically detected, and then go into safe mode and see if i can uncheck / check settings for the PCI bus, and go on from there would yield better results? 

i was also thinking whether it also would be better / if it's possible / necessary to install with prompt mode and acpi disabled at the same time? combining "setup /p b" and "setup /p i" that is. i do not know how to do it myself or if it can even be done in the first place. 

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Umm...looking at your laptop, it uses the SiS 650 chipset. It should be fully compatible with 98SE without any setup switches or anything. Don't know why you have such problems.

Did you update to the latest BIOS?

How much RAM do you have? If more than 512MB, remove some.

For drivers look up "sis 650 windows 98" and "sis 650 gigabyte" in Google.

Also the official SiS website of course: http://w3.sis.com/download/agreement.php?url=/download/

I don't know about WiFi drivers (which might be one major problem), since I do not know the WiFi module.

Does the laptop work fine with other OS like XP? Maybe the hardware is faulty.

Try installing with a clean hard drive and just straight OEM CD/retail CD with bootdisk without any switches or modifications.

Edited by MrMateczko
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3 hours ago, MrMateczko said:

Umm...looking at your laptop, it uses the SiS 650 chipset. It should be fully compatible with 98SE without any setup switches or anything. Don't know why you have such problems.

Did you update to the latest BIOS?

How much RAM do you have? If more than 512MB, remove some.

For drivers look up "sis 650 windows 98" and "sis 650 gigabyte" in Google.

Also the official SiS website of course: http://w3.sis.com/download/agreement.php?url=/download/

I don't know about WiFi drivers (which might be one major problem), since I do not know the WiFi module.

Does the laptop work fine with other OS like XP? Maybe the hardware is faulty.

Try installing with a clean hard drive and just straight OEM CD/retail CD with bootdisk without any switches or modifications.

i am using the latest bios a08, i have 512 MB ram installed, i never encountered issues with 512 MB ram on windows 98SE, i even successfully installed some systems with 1 GB ram without needing to edit the system.ini from before. the laptop does not come with a mini pci slot, i ordered a rtl8185 based cardbus wireless adapter that supports wpa2 with 98SE driver and can be used with odyssey client 4.56 i believe ( i did not test this yet ) for this specific card.

i did try windows 95 and windows 2000, windows 95 did not have a sis 650 gpu driver, although i think no such driver exists, i tried the oldest one i found which i think is supposed to be for the "Regular" sis 650 or desktop version, regardless, i do not have w95 installed currently nor do i plan on installing it anytime yet. this thread was mainly on how to get the laptop working on 98SE, although i was gonna mention things like i just did now too. 

oddly, everything worked fine on windows 2000, except for the sound, despite installing the exact pci ven hardware id and device manager indicated it as working, the volume icon was missing and sounds wouldn't work through testing in the sound control panel app due to being greyed out and the volume option to place it in the taskbar were greyed out, in windows 95, the sound worked fine, so that's why it was odd, the usb controllers installed in windows 95, although i did not test it all the way to get the unknown device to be reported properly later on from reboot which is a common issue i have had with many systems using the unofficial usb update xusbsupp. 

the laptop isn't very favorable for 9x and legacy support due to lack of many hardware such as the mini pci slot, no serial or parellel ports, i was aware of this before obtaining it, but i thought it COULD still work fine on 98SE as still an ok option, but unfortunately, it ending up being a very difficult system to work with it. 

i always start installations on clean wiped hard drives, and i mentioned that i already tried without the setup switches, regular setup does not allow hardware detection to fully complete and freezes around 16 percent. i even tried to see if i can try NT 4.0 server operating system because apparently there is a sis m650 gpu driver for it and sound, ethernet and modem drivers available, but i wasn't able to get past the part where it says setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration, it would just hang there for a while. 

overall, i think the bios just is poor or has many limitations that can't be changed / fixed, at least not practically. the laptop did originally come with xp and it worked fine when i first obtained it. i know that the sis 650 chipset itself is supported under windows 98SE as i have tested many systems in the past with no issues, but this particular one is picky apparently, and i do not believe it is due to faulty hardware as hinted out earlier, however i was hoping maybe someone could make sense out of the specific issues i am having and see if there is any hope or solutions in getting things to work better for 98SE mainly, but possibly for other OS. 

Edited by cov3rt
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7 hours ago, MrMateczko said:

Try flashing an older BIOS, maybe the latest one causes trouble in 98SE.

Also try unplugging as much stuff as you can inside your laptop (modem and other not necessary stuff)

yeh, i was thinking maybe an older bios may help, dell's official site only has A07 as the oldest available, however, based off a google search, one person listed A02 bios from the site in the below url, mentioning that they wanted to flash to A06. i have not been able to find older bios updates yet, ironic they had mentioned the dell inspiron 1000 being the worst dell laptops ever, and i would agree on that so far. 

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/scrapping-i-found-more-s***-yay/104804

i just tried to downgrade the bios from A08 to A07 in DOS prompt and it started beeping loudly a little, i wasn't able to remember the exact error message it also gave while it went to some weird screen with some red borders, i think it said something to do with flash memory problem? i used "A07I1000", the other bios update versions seem to be for windows only and not in dos mode. 

update: the error message when trying to flash the bios is  Cannot Flash If Memory Managers (e.g. HIMEM) present.

Edited by cov3rt
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well i've been hitting many brick walls with no available solutions from google searching. i can't even get the d*** laptop to flash to an older version by using uniflash 1.40, complains about that error above, cannot flash if memory managers (e.g himem ) present. i tried to use the winphlash method but unfortunately, dell doesn't provide a bin or rom file that seems to be needed, and google search will not help with the related errors, worse enough, as i was searching dell's site, i have this message pointed out by dell below

"There will be some occasions when the BIOS downgrade will not be allowed due to BIOS dependency, meaning the current BIOS has changes that cannot be downgraded. If you are unable to downgrade your BIOS, please contact Dell Technical Support for further advise, using the details supplied in the link below.", 

so that it would seem that there is a chance you can't even go back, the only other ways i haven't tried on the top of my mind is installing windows 7 32 bit really quick and run as administrator but it's unlikely that it will be different and if it doesn't work, then the above statement might just be the culprit, the other solution would be to boot uniflash on it's own, i do not seem to know how to boot it on it's own, i have to use 98SE boot disk first and then run uniflash 1.40 from within dos, perhaps that could be the reason why i have that himem error. 

i think that from A05, the ACPI changes, according to the text document history of the bios updates of dell inspiron 1000, could possibly be the reason i can't get it to work on 98SE or other systems, perhaps that either A04 or A03, or even A02 would allow proper functioning IF you can even downgrade the bios in the first place, and even then, where would you find these updates as i have no idea where to find them or if they are available. 

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IMO, you'd be best served by installing Win 2k on that laptop. It'll probably be the best compromise between usability and compatibility, in this particular case...
Of course, those're just my 2¢.

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16 hours ago, dencorso said:

IMO, you'd be best served by installing Win 2k on that laptop. It'll probably be the best compromise between usability and compatibility, in this particular case...
Of course, those're just my 2¢.

yes, i would agree, after a ton of experimenting and frustration, i finally went back and installed windows 2000 again ( 3rd time ), although the laptop trolled me this time and for some reason, it wouldn't successfully install the unofficial update roll up, despite it working last time i experimented with it, however, the sound driver worked this time, although i installed using in the setup way, rather than just pointing the device to the inf folder from device manager, strange but at least all the hardware works now, the sound working this time could have to do with maybe formatting / wiping the hard drive properly before re-install, because the 2nd time i installed, it seems that i didn't start fresh like i should have. the unofficial update rollup probably didn't work because i might have skipped something and / or didn't restart the system when i was supposed to, basically messing everything up in between. 

 

Edited by cov3rt
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