It is likely possible to get this board to work with WIN98SE, not sure about
WIN98, but it will take some iterative installations. I recently had a hard
drive related corruption of my WIN98Se installation with an older K7V board.
Since all new drives are ATA133, I reluctantly decided to buy a new board
(A7N8X Delux) and risk that I could get WIN98SE back working.
It took me over 1 week to get this back to working on my 2 PC peer-to-peer
LAN with ICS as host on this machine. I have WIN2K, but desired to try to
keep the WIN98SE working since I have far more knowledge of WIN98SE than
WIN2K.
I had been trying to re-install over the previous installation. In
retrospect I should have done this differently. I also tried a clean
install to another drive, but the ATI Radeon 7500 card would not work
correctly, which I expect was due to the video card needing Direct X version
newer than the default of the version with WIN98SE.
The hanging you are observing is WIN98 detecting and attempting to apply
drivers for a device which is not applied prior to this step. This can be
devices like a LAN chip/card; the ACPM bus drivers; AGP drivers; Virtual
Memory.
I have performed several motherbaord upgrades using WIN98SE. There is a
Catch-22 aspect namely, WIN98SE has to be working correctly so it detect and
installs drivers properly, but the drivers have to be loaded in order for
WIN98SE to work properly.
The will likely be a particular order of device installation to boot-strap
your way to get this to work.
I would recommend you try the following if you are installing over the
existing WIN98 version :
a) For the initial install remove all cards other than the video card.
Ideally if the m'board has on-board audio, temporarily disable it.
b) Boot to Safe mode and select Standard VGA driver and also temporarily
disable Wirtual memory. It is very important to remove all devices which
are redundant (more than 1 record of an item showing) and especially those
which were relevant to the old motherboard. This will be time consuming,
c) If you have a method to copy the motherbaord drivers from the CD to the
hard drive do so. The initial operation of WIN93SE after detection may not
install the PCI bus correctly due to WIN98SE not knowing this board's chips.
This can result in the PCI CD drives now being activated, and hence the
drivers needed to get the PCI bus working will not be able to be installed -
part of the Catch 22.
I had to attach my hard drive to the second PC for this transfer.
d) Reboot. You should now be able to get WIN98 working, although it will
be slow. It is critical to get the minimal installation working before
progressing.
e) Once WIN98 gets through the initial install, then add the motherbaord
drivers. Frequently these are the "All-in-one" drivers. This adds the
motherboard PCI drivers, and other chip suport.
f) Install the latest version of Direct X which you have available.
g) Try to install the correct video drivers. This will test whether AGP is
working.
h) Once you get to this point, turn off the system and add one card at a
time.
Good luck. I think the problem is not really the board, but the fact that
WIN98 is old enough that it does not contain sufficient out-of-the-box
knowledge/drivers for this hardware, and so needs to have the drivers loaded
in a step wise manner.
Dave Paine.
