DNA,

This post was very helpful. Thank you for clarifying. 

I tried to contact you off-list last week using this board's link to your email address. 
Apparently you didn't receive? Please contact me at  ginahoy at aol dot com.

Thanks, David





On Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 6:27 pm, DNA wrote:
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.

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. 

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