ZTK said:
ZTK wrote:
I'm helping a friend upgrade his computer with an S939 A64
3000+ and an MSI 480M2-IL mobo, using the onboard video,
no expansion cards, 80GB Seagate Barracuda PATA.
Since he already has a Win98SE CD, I tried to install that and
ran into trouble in the final stages. It always hangs at the "Verifying
DMI pool data" stage when restarting, and can boot only in Safe
Mode. I checked the BIOS settings and repeated the process
several times. I even repeated the installation after reformatting
the boot partition. The only way I can get it to finish the installation
or boot properly is by disabling the L2 cache.
I tried installing Win XP and it completed without any problem.
The question is : Is this the way MSI makes 'em and my friend
will have to buy WinXP, or did I miss something ?
I've thought about your problem some, as this motherboard is virtually
idential to the one used an Emachine I'm somewhat familiar with it.
MS-7093. It *should* be capable of loading Win98SE or WinME with the
following restrictions: No RAID (no drivers), possibly no SATA but
definitely no boot from SATA. At best the sata support will be storage
only.
Understood.
That being said, verifying DMI pool freezes are usually: Bad info in the
CMOS (such as drive geometry, boot order - possible), bad hard drive
(unlikely), bad boot record (possible), corrupt BIOS (unlikely).
Drive geometry & boot order - double-checked, OK.
HDD - tested thoroughly on another system. XP installs OK.
MBR - restored twice.
Corrupt BIOS (?) - No prob wth XP.
It may simply be that it doesn't want to deal with SATA and you have to
take it out of the boot order, or disable the raid rom in it. SATA came
along well after Win98. This is just a brainstorming possability. Even
though you don't have any SATA devices installed it still has a
controller for it & a raid controller.
Will check the SATA thing.
I think a more likely culprit is the memory restrictions of windows 98,
esp after you said disabling the cache seems to allow you to boot into
safe mode...
Uh... I could boot into safe mode w/o disabling anything. Disabling
L2 cache allows me to do a full normal boot.
I have encountered problems with Windows 98 with systems with more 512MB
of memory (or even 384MB with a 128MB graphics card or a large AGP
apature as it all uses the same memory space). I haven't had them freeze
at boot though, they usually just give out of memory errors when you try
to do anything, but I've never tried it on a system with a GB of memory.
(I don't know how much memory you are running, so this may or may not
apply.)
Sorry, I should have mentioned the amount of RAM at the beginning.
It's just 256MB (PC3200) with 64MB allocated for the onboard video,
and 64MB graphics aperture size - both default values.
If you have a lot of memory you might try this fix, boot to safe mode
(or DOS if you can't get into safe mode, just made sure you have EDIT on
the disk) and manually edit vcache, which is in the Windows 98
system.ini file. It should be in C:\WINDOWS\system.ini
You might try adding values like:
[VCache]
MinFileCache=40000
MaxFileCache=500000
That *should* work if the problem is memory.
Good luck.
-Timbertea
You can run without the L2 cache, you'll pay about a 10-15% performance
penalty disabling it. It may be easier than tracking down this problem.
heh An email to MSI support is probably in order as well, maybe they
have encountered the problem before.
I keep wondering since L2 cache disabling fixes it if it isn't an issue
of something being cached that is causing the lock up. Strange as it may
be as these shouldn't keep a system from booting (it just waste a little
bit of your L2 cache space). In the bios you have settings for System
Bios Cacheable, Video Bios Cacheable, it may have something called
Shadow Cache, or C000,32KB VGA. Each of these just caches rom
information into the L2 cache of the processor. Safe mode can benefit
from the caching of these as it communicates directly with the video
rom for VGA mode (or the cache of it if it's enabled), real DOS mode
benefits from it (but will run without it), DOS box mode possibly uses
it (I'm not 100% sure) but will work without it. Once you get into
Windows itself, device drivers take over this communication and it's
just wasted L2 cache. Disabling these shouldn't hurt system performance
in Windows.
There generally isn't a benefit to caching the system BIOS, or the Video
BIOS. At least with WinXP/Windows 2000 and I'm pretty sure 98 only
benefits in DOS box mode. Safe mode uses them, but how much time do you
really spend in safe mode? Not much.
It may be worth a try to disable bios caching, shadow caching, and
"C000, 32KB VGA" caching (it may be called Video BIOS/ROM cacheable) in
the bios. Then try reenabling the L2 cache and see if it will boot then.
The ATI chipset is very new, maybe it's just something that slipped past
testing (I doubt they had Windows 98 in mind...).
Sorry if this isn't as clear as I would like, I'm tired, sick, and
generally not feeling well today. Good luck.
-Timbertea
