Is it possible to run win98 on a Dimension 4600 ???

Because the 4600 BIOS does not give you an opportunity to go from "Enhanced" to "Legacy" mode for the ATA controllers, I don't think you will ever be able to avoid having the Win98SE OS detect the SATA interface. I seem to be able to live with the "exclamation point" without random errors popping up.

Message Edited by awluck on 11-28-2003 10:32 AM

I have been able to get Win98 up and running except for the Video. It keeps complaining about the address allocation in Device manager. This is true even when using a VGA driver, actually I cannot get any other driver to work. I tried various version from nVidia with no success. I don't believe that the video drivers is the problem. The problem seams to be because the video card (GeForce FX 5200) is not able to get a hold of the required resources. The first address range it complains about in device manager is 0000 0000  to 07FF FFFF.

I have the same PC configuration as truf618 above. Has any one else experienced this problem? How did you solve it.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks.

running the Win98 setup with the "setup -p i" options solved this problem for me (see earlier in the thread for details on this)

Did you manage to solve the conflict with the 2nd Intel(r) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers occurence in device manager?

I never ran into that problem. Do you have a SATA drive included in your system? "awluck" indicated this error was due to SATA. I believe the BIOS had options to disable the SATA drives, or you could unplug that drive. Regardless, I never saw this device have a problem.

Thanks for all the replies.

I reread this thread after my post and noticed the setup /p i swhitch, but have not tried it yet - I won't get a chance to try it till the weekend.

Does SATA share address space with the video? I'm not sure what the connection is, since I'm only having problems with the video.

BTW. I tried installing DirectX 9, yah a move of desperation, and that completely killed my Win98 to the point where the "Blue screen of death" reigns supreme. I have had bad experiences with DirectX  and Win98 before. Oh well, that’s what I get for experimentation.

Message Edited by SanLorenso on 12-03-2003 08:24 AM

Conflict has something to do with the 4600 being an ACPI system but Win98 not handling ACPI very well. Not sure how the video is related, but if you run with these setup switches to disable ACPI support you should then have your video working. You will have to follow the other steps outlined by al646 on 11-27 and you should then have your system working.

For truf618

 

I have a standard Dimension 4600, I'm not a technology guru, but I'm pretty sure that all my drives are Ultra ATA. The machine probably comes with a SATA controller, but I don't think it's used, did you disable SATA in BIOS?

Are you sure you don't have any conflict in device manager?

Thanks for your help

Have done some searching and found this post from microsoft.public.win98.pnp:

Suddenly, after installing an IE6 security update, I'm
getting a resource conflict between my nVideo AGP video
card and the "system board extension for ACPI BIOS". The
conflict reported by the nVidia card is:

Memory Range 00000000 - 00FFFFFF used by:
System board extension for ACPI BIOS

Apparently this is a known and recognized problem
documented by knowledge base article 217392. According to
this article there was a selective distributed hotfix
which could resolve this problem, but no such download can
be found.

I've tried updating my Award BIOS, re-installing Win98SE,
updating my nVidia driver, updating my Via Chipset drivers
all to no avail. I've tried turning off ACPI and
rediscovering all devices, but if I do this I get the same
conflict with the "system board extension for PnP BIOS".

Can this be remedied?

No answer to this question yet. However, maybe we're looking into the wrong direction for a resolution of the conflict?
Regards

Hallo,
I'm running (well, not yet) a Dell 4550 with XP/Win98 dual boot. XP works well. Win98 is on a second drive imaged from an older computer. Most things run well after a lot of hard work, but I ran into the same problems of a conflict between the nvdia driver (GeForce MX 420) and the System Board extension for ACPI Bios . This conflict showed up only since I installed the Intel Chipset driver for the 845 Chipset. Just to let you know it's not only on 4600 Dells.

The main problem seems to be that the System board extension is always installed twice by the device manager. As soon as I delete one ore both, the device manager comes up and installs it a second time or twice, respectively. That's no problem unless one installs the nVidia driver too. when it comes to conflicts. I have yet no clue how to stop this double installation, although I've tried a lot to stop this strange behavior.
In some other forum I've read that the problem may be the PCI bus manager, but I didn't find a way to install a proper driver for this. Does anybody know which driver to take?
If anybody finds a solution to this problem, please post.
Regards
Dankwart

Hmm, the resource conflict could result from too much memory: Win 98SE can only handle 512 MB. If you fit more than this into your machine, it can't cache it and will work even slower. Above 1 GB RAM, I have read, there will be conflicts with video cards. Sorry that I can't provide you more details - I just write it down as I remember what I have found on various sites ...

Try to limit the amount of RAM in Win 98SE: click on START, RUN and type MSCONFIG; click on ENHANCED OPTIONS (not sure if it is labeled this way - I'm using a German version of Win 98SE). There you'll find an option to use only a certain amount of RAM.

Message Edited by Trontir on 12-17-2003 02:47 PM

hi,

I've been trying to get win98se video display to work properly on my 4600 for six months now. Only get 16 colors, looks terrible.

 I  have posted on here but was just advised to download various drivers, all to no avail. I'm sure it is more than a driver issue, but I don't know what.

 Tried cloning a win98se drive (my old laptop) and also clean install on partition. No joy, display still only 16 colors.

Dell support no help at all. They just jump at the chance to say something is 'not supported'.

maybe trying this new setup switch will work...but do I want to start all this up again???

rijker

Message Edited by rijker on 12-16-2003 06:48 PM

It will not work unless you use setup /p i switch.

---

@al646 wrote:

(...)

All drivers are installed, but when I go to device manager, in the Hard disk controllers, the following line shows up twice:

Intel(r) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers

The 1st occurence is OK, but I have the Exclamation mark on the 2nd line...

I tried to delete the 2nd line, but when I click refresh, it comes back.

The error message for this device is something like that:

This device is disabled because BIOS did not give an IRQ, you must enable device in BIOS or contact computer manufacturer for updated BIOS

Any idea?? I'm so close...

(...)

---

I encountered the same error this week. To solve it, just go into your BIOS and look for an option labeled "Configure Harddrives". In my case the slave drive/port on the primary IDE port was diabled. Just enable it and reboot. Maybe it's in your case another port that is disabled in BIOS, if you don't have a drive connected to it, you could just ignore the exclamation mark. It's merely an advice, not an error ;-)

Message Edited by Trontir on 12-19-2003 10:18 PM

Hi....I just stumbled on this thread. Back in Sept 2003, I got Win 98SE running (on my Master drive) with my  Dell 4600 3.2GHZ with MSI Nvidia 5900, and not only that, with the aid of Partition Magic's Boot Magic, I got my _bootable_ slave drive running Win98SE as well!! Took a few weeks getting all the proper drivers (to get that crummy stock Dell BR modem running I succesfully used a Gateway modem driver). The main key after getting the drivers and installing Win98Se was removing ACPI in Device Manager then clicking on update and selecting Microsoft Plug & Play and then letting it cycle itself. I made no bios changes except to turn off Power Management. Worked great! Long live Win98SE!

 

 

Message Edited by siffert on 06-05-2004 02:44 PM