Primary and secondary IDE controllers conflicting

[Dr.Atom]

I have an MSI P965 Neo2 board. The PC is a dual boot system with Win98SE and Win XP. There are official drivers for XP for this board, and for Win98SE I used the retrofitted ICH8 drivers to get full support. The issue I'll be describing now is not related to the chipset drivers, however, as the issue already existed before installing the drivers.

This board is a bit special. It has one IDE connector for two devices which are occupied by a DVD and a CD drive/burner. Then there are 4 SATA-II ports and one special SATA port that identifies everything connected to it as IDE (very helpful when installing Win98 on an SSD!). Also, there's a floppy drive. An SSD is attached to the first SATA port and an HDD to the second SATA port. The SATA-as-IDE port is currently not in use (only for the installation of Win98).

The issue is that on 98SE I am not able to use the two drives connected via IDE. They are not even being recognized. In the device manager under hard disk controllers, there are 3 entries (Intel ICH8 4 port SATA storage controller, Intel ICH8 2 port SATA storage controller and Standard Dual IDE PCI controller). I have those entries in 98 and XP. Each of these three controllers has a primary IDE controller and a secondary IDE controller. In 98, those six controllers all have the yellow exclamation mark telling me that they don't work and/or I should update a driver. They work fine on XP and I can see both IDE drives.

On Vogons there is thread that someone fixed this by setting the controller options to either off, both or alike etc. I did that but I had no success. Is there some logical combination I could try that maybe I forgot? What other approaches could there be?
As a consequence of those controllers not working, I also have my file systems in MS-DOS compatibility mode and got a blue screen (not "of death") on first boot after installation, that "your multi-function device (Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller) has some child devices using 32-bit drivers and others using compatibility-mode drivers. This configuration is not supported [....] Windows will use compatibility-mode drivers for each child device attached to this multi-function device. [....]".

Happy to provide more information. What I already checked is the configuration of the three main controllers on XP. They seem to be using different interrupts there, but I wouldn't know what to make of this.

 

Edited July 26, 2024 by Dr.Atom

[schwups]

The problem has been discussed here many times. You will definitely get information here https://msfn.org/board/topic/97588-modern-motherboards-which-are-working-with-windows-98-discussion/.   Of course there are more matching topics on this board.

Search in the bios for SATA and IDE settings - something like "compatible mode". And maybe you can disable one SATA controller (4 port or 2 port). It should reduce the Controllers. Or you can try R. Loew's SATA Patch. How many and which devices do you want to use (Pata or/ and Sata)?

 

[Dr.Atom]

Thank you. In the BIOS under "Integrated Peripherals" and "On-Chip ATA devices" I can configure "SATA #1 Configuration" to be either disabled, compatible or enhanced. The regular SATA ports are number 1-4 and the SATA-as-IDE port is #7. At the moment, the SSD with all partitions is plugged into #1, but setting it to "compatible" has no effect (it was on "enhanced" before). According to the manual "Compatible" here is defined as "Legacy IDE Channels will only use IRQ14 and IRQ15". Also PCI busmastering is enabled. But I had it on disabled, too, and there were no changes. But honestly, I don't really know what PCI busmastering is. Also, "SATA#1 configuration" seems to be a misnomer, as when setting this to "disabled" it will disable SATA ports #1 and #2 and remove the 4-port SATA storage controller from the device manager...
I can't disable the Marvell 88SE6111 chip, which controls the IDE connector as well as the SATA-as-IDE port since I will want to use the IDE port.

Consequently, I assume, that the 4-port SATA storage controller is in fact only 2 SATA ports but listed as 4-port as there might be boards that have 6 SATA ports. The other 2-port SATA controller is therefore the controller for SATA ports 3-4. The SATA-as-IDE port is either not listed as a controller or it is the "Standard Dual PCI SATA controller". It's really confusing...

I did install the SATA patch by R.Loew. For that I booted into Safe mode, applied the patch, copied the inf file, removed the "Standard Dual PCI IDE controller" from the device manager and rebooted. After reboot, this device became a "Standard Dual PCI SATA controller", but nothing changed.

The thread you mentioned is really long, and I am not too deep into Windowsland to be able to extract all the relevant information. Could you point me to the relevant parts maybe, please? On the last page the AHCI patch by R.Loew is mentioned. Is this relevant to me? There is no mention of AHCI/RAID in the manual.

I appreciate any help, but maybe take me a bit by the hand and be more explicit to what I have to do.
 

Quote

How many and which devices do you want to use (Pata or/ and Sata)?

2 PATA devices (CD burner and DVD reader). Although one would of course suffice.
2 SATA devices (1 SSD with the operating systems, 1 2TB HDD with mostly game images to be shared by all OSes). The HDD is currently not plugged in as I wanted to get the OSes all working first.

It's kind of strange that SATA is working and IDE is not on Win98... I mean, I could just buy a SATA internal CD drive, but where's the fun in that

(apologies to everyone witnessing the editing marathon...)

Edited July 29, 2024 by Dr.Atom

[Dr.Atom]

What I've done now: I disabled SATA ports 1+2, disabled the IDE controller (the Marvell chip), leaving me only SATA ports 3+4. I attached the SSD to one of the ports and booted into Win98. Still yellow exclamation marks! The only controller left was a "2-port SATA storage controller" confirming my assumption from before that the "Standard Dual PCI SATA controller" was indeed the IDE drives' controller.
I then went into safe mode and replaced the "2-port SATA storage controller" with R. Loew's SATA driver. This worked as the entry in the device manager is now also called "Standard Dual PCI SATA controller", but the yellow exclamation marks remain. I'm at a loss as to why this is still happening with this minimal setup.

[schwups]

First of all, there is probably no guarantee that everything will work the way you want. I don't use the AHCI or SATA patch anywhere. I tried to install the SATA Patch once, but without success. Other members can help you better here. I did a lot of things simply by trial and error.

Without SATA Patch:
Normally, "Compatible Mode" also means, that only two SATA slots are enabled. These slots often differ from those in the instructions. So you must try it out. WinME/98 can't handle all three controllers, SATA,PATA (Marvell IDE) and Marvell SATA by default (without SATA Patch). So you have to give up one or two of it. After a failed driver installation, it is recommended to delete the SATA/PATA devices (bad configuration) in the registry (e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MF) or from the device manager in SafeMode F8. Or there is the possibility to reset the complete registry.

I've always enabled "PCI IDE Busmaster".

Edited July 29, 2024 by schwups

[Dr.Atom]

Well, I don't believe it!!

I told myself, I'd only install 98 one more time. After that I'd get a dedicated machine if the era. 

This time plain vanilla. Only 512MB RAM, no patches. ... And it just works! ...

I have all IDE and SATA functionality, no more compatibility mode which makes it even faster than before. 

I installed all drivers and I still have my drives. Now, I will use Linux on another partition to create a backup image of the 98 partition. After that I will also install the ICH8 SATA controller drivers (the only ones from the retrofitted ICH8 drivers I haven't applied so far), and also R. Loew's Patchmem. This way I can always revert.

Until now I only ever installed 98 with the patched CAB file version of Patchmem. Maybe the patch applied in retrospect will be different than the CAB version. I'll let you know. 

I'm very happy. So close to giving up!

[schwups]

I'm surprised. Well then, congratulations.  Can you give us a picture of your DeviceManager/HardDiskControllers.

In case that something goes wrong you also have the possibility to reset the registry with scanreg.exe. Boot DOS - at Prompt (F5) change direction from A: to C:

Type: C:\windows\Command\scanreg /restore. Select the previous registry you want to restore.

Yes, you should backup 98 to be on the safe side.

[Dr.Atom]

It still works like a charm. I have to correct myself, though. The new install I did was with the Patchmem CAB files. But what changed the whole thing, was that the SSD and the secondary HDD were both plugged into the SATA ports set to "compatible" in the BIOS. I had never done this before, they were always on "enhanced" when installing. This is the only change I can think of compared to before.

Something that also mattered probably, is that I did not have to reformat the C: drive. I simply booted into WinXP, deleted the Windows folder on the Win98 partition, then booted back into Win98 which threw errors and put me on DOS prompt but I could simply start the setup as I had copied the CD files onto C: before. That way I avoided having to use the SATA-as-IDE port which I had to use on the previous installs for Win98 to even find the SSD.

So, I did not have to install Patchmem as it was already included and Win98 boots fine with my 8GB of RAM installed. All SATA and IDE drives working + no need for the SATA-as-IDE port. The only next step still missing is installing the ICH8 SATA drivers. So far it's just the plain vanilla Microsoft ones doing the job. I'm not sure if I should considering everything is working fine. But then, I'd still have the backup.

I will add screenshots soon.

Consequently, this means that my quad boot PC is now fully functional! Win98SE with an S3 Virge/3dfx Voodoo2 combo on PCI, WinXP with a GeForce 8600 GTS on PCIe, Win10 (with the same 8600 or even a GeForce RTX 1030) and Debian all available through one Grub boot menu :-)
Is there like a dedicated subforum to post the success story and the way I got there? I'd like to share.

[schwups]

Ok, you have set compatible mode in BIOS.

8GB RAM - then you can also test R Loew's RAMDSK32/64 or SweetLow's ramdrv4m.

Is DMA enabled in DeviceManager/DiskDrives/Drive Properties/Settings?

2TB HDD: Make sure, that RLoew's HIGH CAPACITY DISK PATCH and TERABYTE PLUS PACKAGE is included (in Patchmem CAB files?) to avoid data loss.

Edited July 31, 2024 by schwups