ATA drivers

[Challenger]

Are the drivers on an Asus system board cd any better than the ones that WinME automaticaly install on a clean install?

 

[Jeff H]

Challenger, I can't address your question directly, but I do have a related question/observation for you. First off, what board are you talking about?

I recently set up a CUSL2-C for a friend, along w/ a P!!!-866. I installed the Intel INF update, and that went fine. I then installed the latest ATA100 driver from Intel, and then the flakiness set in. End result was blue screens, caused by everything from putting in or taking out a CD from the DVD drive, firing up or shutting down Windows Explorer, and on and on. Oh, OS is Win98 Gold.

I wasn't far enough into it to matter, so I formatted the drive and started over, this time not installing the Intel ATA100 drivers. Guess what, not one blue screen. I enabled DMA in Device Mangler, and the system flies! In hindsight I recall reading something to the affect that the ATA100 driver is flakey on the CUSL2 series of boards.

 

[Challenger]

The boards I use are the Cusl2-C and every time I set a system up(I've set up 8 now with this board)I try to install the INF update in WinME or the ATA drivers I get a message saying the OS is new enough to not need these files so I quit file install,never have a problem with the drivers Windows installs.So I guess I'm better off leaving well enough alone!Thanks for the reply Jeff

 

[tmp]

If you are using Win98 you'll need the INF update. With WinME, you won't need any drivers from your Asus disk. I would stay away from the Intel ATA drivers. Just use the MS ATA drivers. I've had nothing but problems with the Intel ATA drivers. Mostly CD-ROM/CDRW/DVD related. This is on a Win2k machine.

Tom

 

[yellowperil]

Can the Intel ATA drivers be used on non-Intel boards? I had problems with them at first, but got them to work and they have a modest performance increase over the WinMe drivers.

 

[Jeff H]

yellowperil, my guess is the installer looks for an Intel chipset, and if it doesn't find one it aborts the install.

tmp hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned. Do the INF update, and stay away from the ATA100 update, at least as far as the CULS2 family is concerned.

 

[Challenger]

Hey tmp that's what I thought but wasn't sure thanks for the input!