Asus A8V (Socket 939)
Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by DNA
(551 messages posted)
Sorry I didn't see your post sooner!
My AMD 3000+ system is based on an ASUS A8V Socket 939 mainboard (the 'plain A8V'
8x AGP & 5 PCI slot version) using the VIA K8T800Pro chipset, and the
3000+ processor is a Winchester core, 1.8 Ghz clock speed.
These mainboards were manufactured in 2005.
You can download the spec sheet on this mainboard
here.
(scroll down to Socket 939, and click the "A8V" with no suffix, the last entry),
and you can see the driver download page
here.
This is probably the best-ever mainboard with full Win9x (98SE/ME) support!
If you want to use a SATA hard drive as the boot drive, (for either O.S.!)
I advise using a SATA PCI controller card instead of this mainboard's built-in VIA
VT8237 SATA chipset. There are a fair amount of 'budget' mainboards now using this
same chipset...
XP had random bluescreen memory dumps with the boot SATA drive connected to the mainboard
VT8237,
but it's never happened since I changed the drive to the controller card!
Also, any Win9x that's freshly installed directly to a SATA drive that's connected
to the mainboard will not load Windows' CD-ROM drivers correctly (so, you'll have
no access to the CD drives!), and all the hard drives will be in MS-DOS access
mode! OUCH!
You can, however, install Win9x to an IDE drive first, install the VT8237
SATA driver in 9x, then clone the drive's contents to a SATA drive, and that's
how I worked around that issue...
However, installing Win9x to a SATA drive on a PCI controller card is 'cake', because
then Windows Setup will think it's installing onto a hard drive on a 'SCSI controller',
and everything will load correctly, and you can install the SATA 'SCSI controller'
driver after Win9x is up and running (you'll see a yellow "?" in SCSI Controllers
in Device Manager).
Every SATA PCI card I've seen has Win9x support, but they all work at "SATA-1"/"SATA-150"
speed, so some cards will require you to use a jumper setting on SATA-II/"SATA-300"
drives to turn them down to SATA-1 speed.
----------------------------------------------------------
Athlon 1.1 - 768 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Home
Athlon 3000+ 64 - 1024 MB RAM = 98SE (@768 MB RAM) & XP Pro
IBM ThinkPad PIII 900 - 384 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Pro SP2
Windows 2000 Server in the basement
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