Asus A7N8X-E IDE Problem

[driftwood]

I am running Windows 98SE with an AMD XP2200+ processor. I just installed the asus motherboard, and am having a problem with my ide being reset to compatibility mode by Windows, which of course totally kills my cd rom drive accessiblity.

I have a hard drive set up as primary master, cd burner as primary slave, and dvd player as secondary master. I changed the "cd" cable send with the mother board to an 80 pin cable in hopes that would help, but it doesnt.

Every time it happens I go into the registry in safe mode, delete all the references to "bad" ide 's and reboot. It then will work for 6 to 8 times and it all starts over again.

It is using Windows standard dual pci driver. I can't find any other on the asus cd or on their web site.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Tarkus]

A7n8x-e drivers provide IDE controller drivers. have you tried the drives on different cables, removing the CD from the HD cable? try to isolate things. I'd put CD on secondary with DVD also. Go to nvidia and downloade the latest drivers too. then again maybe win98 is different. I haven't dealt with '98 in 4 years.

 

[SOcRatEs]

Welcome to TechSpot

A7n8x-e drivers provide IDE controller drivers. have you tried the drives on different cables, removing the CD from the HD cable? try to isolate things. I'd put CD on secondary with DVD also. Go to nvidia and downloade the latest drivers too. then again maybe win98 is different. I haven't dealt with '98 in 4 years.

Yes I believe this is correct...
compatability mode in 98 means conflict with 16bit drivers, 32bit wont run right.
Follow Tarkus's advice then install 98 on top of the install you have.
Then if this doesn't work do a fresh install of 98.
In MHO you may want to retire 98 for 2000 or XP and end this suffering.. :haha:
G'Luck
let us know what happens

 

[driftwood]

In response to Tarkus, My orginal configuration had my hard drive on ide1 and my dvd as master on ide2 with my cd burner as slave. I still had the same problem.

There are no ide drivers that windows will recognize on the cd that I got with my main board (there are xp drivers). I have tried to update the driver looking in every folder there, the os keeps reverting to the mshdc.inf on my hard drive.

After the compatibility mode problem came up the first time, I didn't know what was happening, so I reinstalled Windows 98SE. It happened again, and I found a post explaining how to edit the registry to get rid of the "bad" ide entries. The third time, I changed the cable sent with the main board marked "CD Cable" to an 80 pin cable and put the cd burner as slave to my hard drive using the grey plug for the cd and the black one for my hard drive. I notice that asus wants the hard drive as a slave. Can you explain this to me? I have always heard that the master should be the hard drive.

This is the fourth time it has happened. Could it be my motherboard? I really hope not. I just ordered it online, and do not want to be out the time waiting for it to be replaced.

I looked on nvidia, but couldn't find drivers for the ide. And my bios is the current version.

Thanks for your help. I really do appreciate it. If you need further details, let me know.

 

[SOcRatEs]

Try here

All in one driver win9x Asus A7n8x-e deluxe
I have the same board but I'm running Xp. These are the all in one drivers
for win 98.

 

[driftwood]

Thanks for the driver file. It is the same driver file that comes on the cd, so things didn't change as far as the ide controller that installed after my computer threw me into compatibility mode again this morning.

I guess my main question at this point would be:

Could this be a problem with the motherboard? I have had a gigabyte and a Soyo on this computer, and had no problem like this. The exact same configuration except for the motherboard.

Next question again lies with the recommendation of setting my hard drive as slave. Why? Could this effect my problem?

I will upgrade to XP if and when I get some extra cash, but in the meantime, I would like to be able to access my cd drives.

Thanks for your head scratching on this one.

 

[SOcRatEs]

past win 98 trouble

In the past when I had compat come up
it was on a machine upgraded from 95 (non-osr2)
or win 3.11 to win 98 (non-se)
in my case it was 16bit ide drivers or even
16bit video drivers that caused conflict with the 32bit.
Started with {Failed to hook ring zero} s3verge 2mb video.
Have you tried booting into 98 with just the hard drive, no cdroms?
G'Luck

 

[driftwood]

I hope it's not too early to say for sure, but...I noticed the bios was occasionally having a hard time recognizing my dvd rom drive. So I removed it, and put a newer one in. That was several days ago, and the compatibility issue hasn't come up again. I'm hoping that was the cause of all the problems.

I still don't know why it didn't show up until I changed out motherboards, but I'm happy if this will take care of the problem.

Thanks for all the head scratchin' out there.
Elaine