ACPI Blaaargh!

[dummy2001]

I'm building a system on the Epox 8KHAL w/ a GF3 ti200, Fortissimo 2 sound card, and a compex rl2000 NIC. My sound card was making windows freeze, I finally got it to work by putting it in 3rd PCI slot. Now I've got trouble w/ win98se freezing on restart or shutdown, or restarting when it is supposed to go into suspend mode. I've tried disabling ACPI and IRQ steering but I can't seem to get things fixed.

I know this is a well known issue but I can't find many actual solutions. There's only one more recent mobo BIOS and it doesn't say anything about this kind of problem. If I disable ACPI in BIOS is it really disabled? Or do I need to reinstall win98se with it disabled for it to really take effect? Any ideas on what to try next?

 

[JustinLerner]

If you disable ACPI in BIOS, you probably should reinstall Windows (any version 98/ME/2000/XP).
If you had just enabled ACPI you would need to reinstall Windows 98 with setup /p j. If you didn't install Windows 98 with setup /p j, then you either installed Win98 with APM or no power managment. (So set your BIOS accordingly.)

Here's another way to enable ACPI in Windows 98:
Edit the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Detect
Create a new DWORD value called ACPIOption and set its value to 1.
Close the registry editor and open Control Panel.
Run ADD NEW HARDWARE and ACPI will be detected and installed.
Restart the computer, and all devices will be re-detected and set up using ACPI.

If you change ACPI in BIOS and are using Windows 2000/XP, you need to reinstall the OS.
98 is more flexible, but should probably still get a reinstall.

 

[dummy2001]

Thanks for the reply Justin. What you say applies to 98se too, not just old win98 right? Is "setup /p j" a dos command? Normally I format my disk then dos boot and run win98_se\setup.exe from the command prompt. How would I apply that command, and why would using ACPI be so cryptic? I thought if ACPI was enabled in BIOS win98se would automatically use it when being installed? I didn't use setup /p j but I do have ACPI BIOS and other ACPI stuff in my device manager.

Does the registry hack require a reinstall? I tried it but it didn't change anything I could see so I reverted. I more or less fixed the shutdown hangs with the windows shutdown patch, but things are still funky. I can't use standby mode, w/ ACPI enabled in BIOS it just restarts itself, w/ ACPI turned off it hangs on a black screen. Also restarts from the shutdown menu work ok, but restarts after software install still freeze on the shutdown splash screen. Another weird detail is that while I was running in safe mode power management options were blanked out but the system did seem to go into actual standby mode and come out again correctly, maybe that was BIOS power management operating then??? Apart from the annoyance, I do use my computer sporadically throughout the day and it would be useful to me to actually use suspend to ram and other advanced energy saving stuff.


Christ on a cracker, its impossible to find consistent info on this topic, you'd think 4 years after "win98" they'd have some kind of definitive answer posted at MS or somewhere.

 

[dummy2001]

Edit: Finally fixed it by pulling the Compex RL2000 NIC out of the machine, that fixed all the ACPI trouble, now I go into standby, come out, restart , shut down, no trouble. Moral: Compex is suckage. That same card caused my modem not to work in my old machine, no matter which PCI slot it was in or what IRQ they had. I got it cheap online, too cheap.