At wits' end with new mobo and IDE controller

[weshuang]

Hi all,

I've been torturing this board with occasional requests relating to a problem I've been having since screwing up, I mean upgrading, my computer.

I upgraded my computer, which has a ton of peripherals hanging off of it, including a 2 IDE HDs, SCSI CD-RW, a zip drive (IDE), CD-ROM (IDE), NIC card for DSL modem, floppy, and one USB device. The upgrade consisted of a used ABIT BH6 mobo and Celeron 300a, overclocked to 450, 128 mb of new pc 150 ram, and a new 250 w p/s.

Anyway, I've been troubleshooting the following problem for weeks and am at wit's end. Device manager (win98se) reports that my primary IDE controller is forced into MS-Dos compatability mode. When I boot, the BIOS reports no problems with the hard drives, however. I have also been having problems with my SCSI CD-RW, which do not occur when I install it on another system. I am hoping that they are related in some way, although Device Manager reports no problems with my CD-RW or SCSI card. I am for now focusing on the IDE controller.

As for troubleshooting, using the MS troubleshooting doc, I have eliminated most common sources of problems. I am running a clean config.sys and autoexec.bat file. There are no resource conflicts (unless the bus-mastering controller being on the same IRQ as the primary IDE controller counts). I have replaced the drivers specified in device manager (which shouldn't have been the problem anyway, since the secondary IDE controller reports no problems and uses the same drivers). One potential cause I haven't eliminated from the MS file are that the hard disk controller in my computer isn't detected by Windows. How can I tell if this is the case? How can I tell if I bought a board with a bad IDE controller?

Some thoughts I have had are to swap the mobo into another system, to swap devices on the controller (secondary controller has zip drive as master and cd-rom as slave). Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Wes Huang

 

[weshuang]

I just saw the following advice on someone else's problem:

>> 2) Now things start to get desparate. Make sure you have ALL of your latest hardware drivers handy. Open up REGEDIT and navigate to the HKEY_Local_machine key and DELETE the ENUM. This key contains ALL of windows hardware information...and I mean ALL. On restart, windows will detect and reinstall all of your drivers. You might just get lucky and fix the problem, although I really don't think hardware is your problem. Nonetheless, it's worth a try before step 3.<<

Should I try that course? On one hand, the computer is not really crashing too much. I don't know how bad the loss in performance from being forced into MS-Dos compatability mode is. On the other hand, weird errors are starting to crop up, like the SCSI CD-RW.

How dangerous is it to delete ENUM in the registry editor?

 

[sgopal2]

I had the same problem with my Win98 1st Edition system when replacing the Mobo/CPU last week.
The BIOS failed to recognize any IDE devices on the secondary IDE port. Check out the following article on Microsoft KnowledgeBase:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q130/1/79.asp

I finally gave up and formatted my C: drive and then installed Windows 2000...it worked flawlessly. Hope this helps

 

[weshuang]

Uggh. That is exactly what I was hoping you wouldn't say.

>> I finally gave up and formatted my C: drive and then installed Windows 2000...it worked flawlessly. Hope this helps <<

 

[sgopal2]

Yeah...I was at wit's end as well. I tried doing all the tricks that it mentioned in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article above, I tried to delete all IDE controllers/drivers and have Win98 reinstall from scratch...nothing worked.

I have no idea why my system was doing that. I was running the following:

Athlon 750 Slot A
Gigabyte 71XE Mobo
3 x 128 MB PC 100 RAM
2 IDE Hard drives
1 Floppy Drive
1 IDE CD-ROM

Win 2000 is a much more robust OS anyway. If you REALLY need Win98, consider installing Win2000 and then have it dual boot both OSes (Win 98 or Win2K). Hope this is useful. If you ever figure out why Win98 screws up the IDE controllers, then please let me know. Thanks.

 

[weshuang]

Holy tamale. Are you saying that you formatted and re-installed Win98 and it still didn't fix the problem? That is truly ugly.

I haven't even considered installing Win2000. I would doubt that most software I use (games) is compatible with win2000?

You're not exactly doing my ulcers a world of good here, padre.

 

[CapNjacK]

Well if it helps any I've been using Win2k since it was beta and I am mostly a gamer.
Games I have that work or have worked fine on Win2k
Heroes 3
Tribes
Quake 2 and 3
Unreal
UT
Tib sun
Alice
MechWarrior 2, 3 , and 4
Dues Ex
Theif (need compatibility update)
Rollercoaster Tycoon
Delta Force 1, 2, and Land warrior.
I have installed many others and have not had any that didn't yet. I do not play any DOS based games so I can't help you there.
As for your problem... if 2k is an option I would go for the upgrade. An upgrade from 98 is better for games anyway cause some game want to see the OS dir as c:\windows or it tells you it won't work at all. (even though it would but it thinks you have NT 4 w/o DX) and it installs itself over the 98 os dir.

 

[Metier]

Have you tried downloading the following Abit120.exe file from abit
abit link

once you download it unzip the files into a temp directory. Go into device manager and double click on the ide interface, click on update driver and point to the temp directory.

That is if this file isn't a self installing exe file.

metier

 

[sgopal2]

Well actually after thinking back...

I got fed up with Win98 and formatted it clean...I never tried to reinstall Win98, I jumped straight to installing Win2000 from CD-ROM.

You may want to format the hard drive and re-install Win98 from scratch. If this doesn't work then you may have to do what I did and install Win2000.

 

[Sukhoi]

What about the &quot;NoIDE&quot; registry key? I think I remember having problems with that before...I think I just deleted it. I can't remember where in the registry it may be though, sorry.

 

[weshuang]

Good dang memory. The NOIDE key is one of the things that can cause my problem. It is specifically dealt with in the MS help files. However, it's not my problem.

 

[Sukhoi]

Ah, oh well. Do you have BIOS overlay software on the drive? That could cause problems.

 

[weshuang]

>> Do you have BIOS overlay software on the drive? That could cause problems. <<

Unfortunately, I don't know what that is. Can you clue me in?

 

[Sukhoi]

Something like EZ-BIOS that's put on the hard drive if the BIOS can't support the size of the hard drive. I put EZ-BIOS on one of my drives when it was in my P133, and I had to go in and disable EZ-BIOS when I moved the drive to my C433, or it wouldn't work correctly.

 

[BadThad]

hummm...the deleting ENUM key suggestion looks familiar, LOL.

Based on what I'm reading here- when you upgraded you didn't wipe the HDD and start clean, eh? You just plugged in all your hardware and booted with original OS? If that's the case, you really should blow away the ENUM key and start over. You're gonna spend 1000000 hours trouble-shooting, or you can spend an hour reloading hardware drivers. It's not dangerous at all to del the ENUM key, I've done it and all it does is wipe hardware info. Just be ready to reload ALL DRIVERS.

If you want to really do the right thing, format the drive and start clean. It will actually save you hours of frustration.

Good Luck!

 

[weshuang]

Badthad,

I'm glad you happened in on this thread. I did of course lift your suggestion to someone else re. the ENUM key. I just didn't want to butt in on someone else's problem.

Based on everyone's tone when I tell them I simply plugged in the board, I should be yelling DOH! Wish there was an emoticon for sheepish.

I will use your ENUM suggestion, maybe that will put an end to my troubles.

Thanks for your help,

Wes Huang