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Windows 98SE on SATA Drives with Intel Chipset - Dell Dimension


pinecloud

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Does anyone has any idea to get SATA drives working on Windows 98 on Intel 900 series (a.k.a., socket 775) ICH7 or ICH8 embedded SATA controller (82801G)?

I bought Dell Dimension that came with SATA hard disks and an ATA DVD RW. It had choice of Vista between XP. I have always been a minimalist on Microsoft platform. I took XP and I did not like it very much. I really wanted Windows 98 SE on it. I am well experienced in SCSI but I have totally been ignorant of new technologies such as ATA, ATAPI, SATA, SAS, USB, 1394 and like. SCSI was easy since it was a shared bus system with addressing relied on physical jumper pin setting. Any OS can get best I/O performance as longer as HBA manufacturer provides correct driver for it. Such SCSI drivers had control structure dig deep into PCI or PCIE root. Of course I pay a lot more for SCSI HBA, hence it has been an established trend to have better access to drivers . Windows 98 SE and NT 4.0 are my favourite OS on Microsoft platform. Windows NT 4.0 is working fine on this Dell after a heavy modification enabling SATA, USB and full NTFS/FAT32FS/EXT2FS and limited UFS/UFS2 support.

EIDE/ATA/SATA do not come so easy. EIDE/ATA/SATA I/O are usually provided by one eighth segment of south bridge therefore drivers become largely chip set vendor dependent. That was definitely one reason I have feared and avoided every new I/O technologies except SCSI. When it comes to EIDE/ATA/SATA, it seems that even software manufacturers have control between the life cycle of their OS and that of the technologies. I do not have solid enough evidences to publicise any issue. However there are the evidence that Intel did try to develop drivers for Windows 98/SE/ME on their newer socket 775 series CPU and 900 series chipset. In 2006 these drivers for these legacy OS started disappearing from Intel web site for some reason. It did seem that it was due to economic interest of some software industries. Again I do not have enough information to pin point who is exactly controlling Intel behind the scene.

I have used a desktop with three 18GB SCSI drives for 10 years, another workstation with two18GB and five 72GB SCSI drives for 8 years. I did change CPU, Memory, motherboard and driver software but the hard drives and OS are exactly the same as when I had built them. I have received notices from eBay, PayPal and an online banking institution that they no longer supported my old Netscape 4.7 or Mozilla 1.0 on Windows NT 4.0 platform. Hence I bought this Dell system in a hurry. Ever since then I have been fighting to get Windows 98 SE working on this Dell machine. I finally had USB working to about 75%. I can use USB block devices such as memory stick or USB disk but then mouse goes out sometimes hence I would say 75%. PCI-E nVidia display card working as well after manual entries on registry - pciven codes. All I have left to work is SATA and EIDE DVD RW which are still in 16 bit compatibility mode access. I can’t even run any disk maintenance utilities when disk are hooked in a compatibility mode.

I have installed Solaris 10 on one of Primary Partition on the second drive with a swap space located at the end of the first drive. I did not have any problem what so ever. Sun openly states that they support their every OS version and have the drivers available for 10 years cycle. I do trust their words – they still have drivers available for their 10 years old Solaris 8. I also installed Linux and working quite well. I do not have trouble, I can handle boot loader like GRUB with ease or even locate kernel directory and put boot code on any PBR at primitive prompt. I do not know how to do these for Windows NT except examine and edit boot.ini using GNU NTFS driver for DOS and save and restore partition boot code using disksave.exe from DOS floppy or Unix dd. Very old fashioned ides from Unix but it works in similar fashion on NT/XP except for booting kernel manually with device map code.

Thank you for your time.

Pinecloud

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Does anyone has any idea to get SATA drives working on Windows 98 on Intel 900 series (a.k.a., socket 775) ICH7 or ICH8 embedded SATA controller (82801G)?

I bought Dell Dimension (...)

You've got a lot of experience with software and hardware.

You probably should have done a little more research into the Dell. Sounds like you could have built your own system from scratch. If so, then you could have chosen a motherboard like the Asrock Dual or Quad-core VSTA (which runs win-98 just fine on SATA drives).

To answer your question, the last Intel chipset to have win-98 support was probably the 875 (which I think was ICH 5). ICH-6 is the 910 to 925 chipset, and ICH-7 is 945 and higher.

The 82801 is an old chip (dates to ICH-2) but perhaps the "G" version is recent (ICH-7?). In any case, this page claims to offer a win-98 driver for it:

http://www.bioticaindia.com/intel-82801g-ich7.html

Or try this one:

http://www.software.com/downloads/drivers-...CB-1121634.html

In Win-98, if you can install the correct SATA driver, then it will appear in device manager as a SCSI controller. But in the system's BIOS you must first configure the SATA drives as RAID, not IDE.

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As I have suspected, it really seems arising from economic interest of software industries got behind Intel. Intel did keep drivers for 8 years cycle until about 2006. Intel’s position is a bit weaker than used to be. Now have multiple competitors.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Des...23〈=eng

Some of you remember about Winternals: Fat32 for NT4.0, NTFS for DOS and like from Texas? Strived on innovative, fearless and yet altruistic leadership. Unfortunately a software industry bought one of two partners out – the one who was creative and altruistic i.e., helping out local industries to keep IT cost down. That was also in 2006.

Thank you all for your time. I downloaded and tried them both. Both popped out a message. ‘Unsupported Operating system!’ and aborted. In the past two months I have downloaded 130 plus files and I was able to get nvidia card without hooking 80945G PCI-e root prior to video card which is usually a perquisite. Made usb mouse and usb keyboard working try and error method. But disk driver is much tough. I can read French, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese so that I have also tried file repositories in those countries as well. I can usually find drivers back to Windows 3.1 era using this method but I may not win this time.

On SCSI platform, I usually allocate a card with i80303 (RISC I/O Processor) and 256MB dedicated memory for every two channels on each HBA and a separate Adaptec 29160 for CD/DVD (only HP and pioneer produced decent DVD on SCSI). Oh, How much have I regretted buying Dell Dimension SATA II System. Do not have even a room to put SCSI drives due to cooling requirement (a 4” fan for every two drives). Anyway I wish that I had not had anything to do with SATA or 82801G ich7 but it is bit too late. I feel so foolish being manipulated and tormented by this tiny 82801G ich7 port # 27c0 and 27df. (SATA-UATAm-UATAs)

I did have Windows NT, Windows 98, O/S2, Solaris 8 and Caldera-SCO Linux in such SCSI system but I also had one small logical volume dedicated for PC DOS and Windows 3.1 (logical volumes created by an i80303 are formed before any OS boots unlike Vista or XP type LVMs and you can have up to 7 LVMs per HBA to be truly compatible to Windows) I had abundant help from Germany to get i80303 card and ELSA –nvidia card working with Windows 3.1 and O/S2. This is a typical proof the new hightech hardware does not have to kill or chase out old OS.

I would greatly appreciate any comment or news about 82801G ich7 driver for Windows 98 SE.

Pinecloud,

:blushing: :blushing:

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(snip) ... I have received notices from eBay, PayPal and an online banking institution that they no longer supported my old Netscape 4.7 or Mozilla 1.0 on Windows NT 4.0 platform. Hence I bought this Dell system in a hurry. ... (snip)

Certainly you are positive that there is no phishing involved here, the emails are legitimate? Having said that, is there no way to spoof the user agent when using Netscape or Mozilla? There must be a Netscape/Mozilla guru somewhere that found the registry hack.

What about the Win9x compatible Firefox 2? Surely it must be acceptable to them. Firefox 2 for you would be an easy update with no learning curve. One thing I would try now since it is easy and will not disturb your existing browsers is to install Opera, and then customize the status line on the bottom of the screen and add the drop-down box that has selectable user agent strings (MSIE/Firefox/Opera) and test all three with those sites. At least you will know what browser is acceptable to them.

(snip) ... Does anyone has any idea to get SATA drives working on Windows 98 on Intel 900 series (a.k.a., socket 775) ICH7 or ICH8 embedded SATA controller (82801G)?

I bought Dell Dimension that came with SATA hard disks and an ATA DVD RW. ... (snip)

Is this one of those Dimension 8400's? I have a couple of them and think for their timeframe were some of the better systems from Dell (but I agree that homemade is always better). The good thing about them is that they have an excellent BIOS with respect to the disk dive sub-system, particularly SATA. You can easily put four different SATA drives in there with four different operating systems and then easily enable/disable any/all for a low-tech but 100% reliable multi-boot scenario.

This means you could install a SATA on one of the four channels and install WinXP and Firefox 3 on it (if it is certain that those websites will not work with earlier Mozilla). Then you could enable that drive in the BIOS and boot to it only when you need to access your online accounts. For those other times, you just enable another SATA drive.

To share data between these mutually exclusive system drives, you might just put a big FAT-32 formatted PATA drive in the Legacy ATA channel (in place of one of the opticals). This drive would always be enabled and any booted operating system would be able to use it.

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