Super slow boot Windows 98 on Sata drive

[Aeridyne]

Hello all. Have an old Emachines here with a 80GB sata drive I wanted to use for Windows 98. Has ATI 200 chipset. Used an image I have for Dell Dimension 2400 I use for starters a lot that I originally used the p and i commands with to disable most of the acpi i believe that does. Has worked well on a lot of systems. Anyway so I booted it up after imaging and it was loading drivers pretty happily but after the drive controllers loaded and reboot all of a sudden it's ultra, mega slow. It loads the first part ok and I see the 98 splash screen and then it just stops. I've had this happen before and I think if I let it sit for like 40+ minutes it would load. Safe mode loads fine. Sata controller is in Legacy mode, legacy USB is turned off, power mode set to S1, hyper threading off. Moved sata cable to port 0, using IDE optical drive so that's not a factor. Disabled all kinds of other stuff with no luck.

Anyone have any experience with this? Its not the first system I've tried to put 98 on and had things going well and then poof it goes to the super mega slow boot. Usually disabling legacy usb is the culprit. I haven't tried many SATA drive builds and this is why, a lot of them I can't get to work that I have tried.

Also I'm not sure if Rlowe's sata drivers would work or be useful since I'm running legacy mode, I saw that he had passed and that is sad news indeed. I never got a copy so now I'm not sure how I could.

[Aeridyne]

Quick update, I tried using a pata drive with no luck, even totally disabled the sata and it still won't load into normal mode. Deleted all entries for hard drive controllers in safe mode and let them reload. Reloads fine, after hardware detect/driver load upon next normal boot it just does it again and won't fully boot. Maybe it's this chipset but you'd think with a pata drive in legacy mode it should just work but it still doesn't. Not sure what I can do.

[LoneCrusader]

rloew's patches can be found here. As for the slow booting issue, I've seen a similar problem before. It may be a problem with Gate A20 line control when loading HIMEM.SYS during boot. I had the same issue on an NForce 4 board and found a solution with rloew's help.

Add a line to your CONFIG.SYS file for HIMEM.SYS and use the "/MACHINE:1" setting and it may solve the problem. If you need further reference, look here.

[Aeridyne]

Thank you LoneCrusader. I've never had any luck on Nforce4 boards myself. I've tried a few and they make me swear a lot usually. I started over from scratch and reinstalled from cd. I used a disk that has some of your stuff on it for the 900 series chips slipstreamed with the /p i switches and so far it works. I didn't try to do it with the sata drive again. Solo pata hd and pata optical with all sata disabled. This time it seems to be working. How exactly would the full syntax of that line I would have needed to add to config.sys gone though? I'm not great at all with adding lines to autoexec or config.sys tbh.

*Edit: I forgot you had put a link there already, I'll try to read that. Also thank you VERY much for the link to the memorial page. I very much appreciate that. I think I bought a few things from him in the past actually. Can't remember what though. I don't remember a lot these days... ha.

Edited February 6, 2020 by Aeridyne

[LoneCrusader]

The NForce 4 board was an anomaly for me, lol, I don't usually use AMD-based boards since back in the K6-2 days. Not had good luck with 9x on that board, or an earlier NForce 3 board either.

device=c:\windows\himem.sys /machine:1

You might still try my suggestion at some point, but given that the problem seems to have gone away after you changed drives it may not be related. If you try that configuration again, use rloew's SATA patch first.

[Aeridyne]

I need to try out his Sata drivers. There are multiple systems that I've tried recently that are newer and I was experimenting with ones that have sata drives and I almost never have any luck with them. Do you slipstream it in to an install? I got installs that would hang on many of them after either the initial copy or after the 1st or 2nd install portion that couldn't complete on sata drives. I don't even bother with ones you can't put into ide mode in bios, but even then a lot of them still won't work for whatever reason. Only one I recall getting to work was HP Dc7600 mini, no extra drivers required, used the same slipstream disk I made with your 900 series stuff in it on all of them installs I do now that are anything above what is normally supported by 98.

Also on that AMD200 system and now also on a 2 others, a 915 and a 945, I have various other issues. On the AMD 200 it will only install good with a fresh install on a pata drive with sata fully disabled. Then if I try to add in any expansion cards to the pci slots it will not boot, screen just stays black where windows would normally start to load.

On the 915 and the 945, I can add in cards to the PCI slots ok, however when I use display doctor to get better graphics and anything higher than 640x480, if I connect a usb drive it will freeze and hard lock.

(I don't like using bearwin on anything I build because any dos console will cause the screen to go to garbage.)

[LoneCrusader]

You can "slipstream" Rudy's SATA patch by placing a patched copy of EDSI_506.PDR and his SATA.INF file in the \WIN98 folder along with the CABs. Any time you need to include an "updated file" where an older version exists in the CABs, you can simply place it in the same folder as the CABs and SETUP will use the unpacked copy instead of extracting the one from the CABs. AFAIK you can also drop drivers into this folder (like SATA.INF) but I haven't tested it myself.

Or, you can actually slipstream it, given that Rudy's 9x slipstreaming tools have been uploaded here.

Some time back I spent a long time trying to fool with an Intel motherboard that had an AMD chipset that I had several of... a D102GGC2 to be precise. If the system you're referring to has the same or very similar hardware, do not waste your time. Not even Rudy could make it work on that board (I actually sent him one to try.) This chipset (or at least Intel's own implementation of it, with their garbage BIOS) is utterly useless for Windows 9x.

I've also seen issues with SDD breaking Plug & Play, but in my case it was on Windows 95 OSR2.x. I never found a solution.. I'd have to find and look back over some old notes to see if I ever learned anything useful about it.

IIRC, VBE9x can be used with DOS Boxes, provided you always run them in full screen mode.