I wonder if someone can help please. I am thinking about upgrading my system and using SATA HDDs. I currently dual boot with 98SE and XP.

I want to continue using 98SE and prior to upgrading, I wanted to be clear on what I need to do. I have read posts on this forum that state that 98SE and SATA will work.

98SE does not natively support SATA so the software to enable SATA has to be loaded ater the 98SE installation.

Questions:

1. Do I therefore install 98SE on a PATA drive then load the SATA driver and copy the installation over to a SATA disk????

2. The mobo I am thinking of using is the MSI K8T Neo2 (Via Chipset/8237 southbridge). I have looked on the Via Arena site and I am confused as to which one it is.

Can anyone help by providing some clarity.

Many thanks

It supports ATA, and AFAIK the only real difference between S-ATA and the older P-ATA is that between the hard drive and the motherboard, data is transferred in series rather than in parallel. I cant think of any reason why the OS would be concerned about such things. S-ATA is nothing new, it is just an evolutionary step of ATA.

Speaking from experience with silicon image S-ATA controllers, 98se doesnt need any software and/or driver to enable S-ATA (DOS doesnt either). The software you can (but dont have to) install after is only for management and monitoring purposes, not for functionality. Many people get confused here because 2K/XP require drivers, and they just assume that 98 does too. I think the difference in drivers is because 2K/XP communicates with hardware through HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and 9x communicates with hardware through BIOS.

Not to get your hopes up too high just yet, I wasnt able to get 98se running on a sis180 S-ATA controller. DOS and win2K worked fine, but for some reason it would not work with 98se using APM or ACPI (BSOD during install).




I have only had one run-in with that controller about a year ago. The only thing I can tell you about it is that it works fine in DOS (thats what I used to image one of the S-ATA drives). To be 100% certain that it functions properly in 98se, you will probably have to find someone who has actually installed 98se on the via 8237 w/ S-ATA drive.

Older operating systems have their advantages over newer ones, that's evident. I just bought an Abit motherboard with SATA and the silicon image controller, but I don't have a SATA hard drive. Thanks for telling about the (lack of) driver installation for SATA under 98se, that was a huge thing I was wondering about when I bought my motherboard.

So far, I've set up several SATA hard drives on my system, which does NOT support SATA at the mobo level.

I'm using the Buslink SATA controller plug-in (PCI) card.
I boot up with my DOS 98/SE or ME floppy and FDISK and then format the SATA hard drive. Then load my OS.
Works like a champ!

I just unplug my IDE devices first to eliminate any possible conflicts.
I've used Ghost Restore twice now from a bootable DVD, to reinstall my XP-pro OS to my new SATA drive. I had to RMA my first WD sata drive.

Good Luck,
Andromeda43

Many thanks for your replies guys.

ssmokee, your explanation has cleared up some of my confusion ( I am also clearer on HAL). The VT8237 (Via) southbridge has 'native' SATA support so 'in theory' from what you are saying I should just be able to install 98SE without any issues. Thereafter I can install the Via SATA drivers for purposes which you have explained namelly, o/s management and monitoring purposes.

Andromeda43, I note your success using the Sata PCI card but I did not want to have my SATA HDD on the PCI bus and hence was trying to get info on installing 98SE on the motherboard's native SATA controller.

In the interim I have read a great number of threads on this issue and the general picture appears to be as follows (reflection of ssmokee's comments).

Many people have installed Win98SE on SATA HDD using their motherboards 'native' sata controller without any problems whatsoever (same way as PATA HDD) and then installed the SATA drivers. Others have had to completely install their o/s on a PATA drive and then install the SATA controller drivers. Once these steps were executed, they would clone the newly created partition to a SATA drive.

I guess I have clarity as to what I should do. I will shortly be doing an install on my test system to see if the theory works fine.

Cheers

Hi risk_reversal,

I just noticed this and can tell you of my experience with the same chipset on my Asus A7V880.

Windows 98SE installed fine and I just needed to install the Via 4-in1's, Sata, and USB 2.0 drivers to get all the devices working optimally and all listed properly in Device Manager.

You'll find that Windows 98SE will run just fine, as will Ms-Dos within Windows, but Ms-Dos Mode will be toast for playing any games. The SATA bios usurpes nearly all extended memory and leaves none for loading emm386.exe, let alone having anything left for expanded memory.

When using a regular IDE HD, the hijacking of extended memory does not occur. However, the board will not run PCI soundcard's dos drivers like the SBLive as it will not enable non-maskable interupts that those drivers require. So, for me, Ms-Dos Mode was still useless even though it was fully functional with the exception of audio. With the SATA drive, Ms-Dos mode is completely useless for gaming but can handle non-memory intensive command line work.

This may not be a problem for you. WDM audio drivers enable dos without FM chip emulation within Windows, and you can use the Dosbox software to emulate Ms-Dos 5.0 with nearly complete audio emulation within Windows 98. That works as well in 98 as it does in XP.

So it should be a positive experience. Really no different than an IDE drive with the exception of that SATA Bios taking legacy Dos fun away from you!

Part of what you'll notice when using BootDisk's or starting up in Ms-Dos Mode on the SATA drive is the old warning that himem.sys cannot control the A20 Line. In my experience that didn't stop me from doing any normal command line functions I wanted to do in Ms-Dos Mode. Just don't try anything memory intensive like games!

Within Windows, you won't notice anything different with the SATA drive.

This is interesting. I think I may be affected by this when using DOS 7.x on a sis180 sata controller and sata drive. If I load emm386 the drive gets bumped down to PIO mode 0 (~3 MB/s), but if I dont load emm386 the drive stays in UDMA mode whatever. Using ghost under DOS the difference in speeds is very very obvious.

If I use my sil3112a sata pci card instead of the native sis180, then I dont have this problem at all.

I know, it may seem like I'm being very dense this morning, but can you explain that comment a bit further?

I myself run Ghost 2003 from a DOS boot FD or CD.
If the process ran any faster, I'd be standing by with a fire extinguisher.
My current OS is Windows XP-Pro+SP2, and I run my 120gig WD SATA drive from a Buslink controller card. I set the drive up with FDISK and formatted it in DOS, before Restoring the OS from a Ghost Image made off of my old IDE drive.

I have 5.66 gig's of stuff on my C: drive and it only takes Ghost 3 minutes to back it up to an Image file using FAST compression....storing the image file on the second partition of my SATA hard-drive.

I don't play old DOS games or anything like that and I've been amazed at the performance of my SATA drive on everything I've ever tried to do with it.

SATA Rocks!

Cheers,
Andromeda43

I was referring to the Mega Bytes per minute speed reported by ghost. Expanding on what I said in my last post, if I have the sata drive hooked up to the sis180 controller *AND* load emm386, performance tanks. I cant remember the exact speed reported by ghost, but I am sure it is between 100-200 MB/minute. If I dont load emm386, then ghost just hums along at 800-1000 MB/minute. I just have the one hard drive so Im going from partition to partition like you are. I always use high compression, but I dont really know how that would affect image creation and restoral speeds.