P650 and Win98

[chaoliang]

The new cards don't support Win 98. I didn't follow the discussion on this issue. Any tips of working around? Thanks.

[UtwigMU]

Use WinNT 4.0, Win2k or WinXP.

If you want to play older games I recommend XP.

Choose shortcut, right click properties, compatibility, use Win98 compatibility mode.

There is also a way to change key if you bought XP but don't want to authenticate them.

All of the above OSes are superior to Win98. Only NT workstation doesn't support PnP and DirectX and has poor multimedia support, but it's otherwise much better WRT to stability, resource management and multitasking.

I ditched 9x for NT in 1999, switched to 2k early this year.

What's your reason to still use Windows 98? (I'd be glad if they'd loose them at work.)

[Kruzin]

There are no 9x drivers for the P series. No workaround.
They are modern cards, and require a modern OS.
If you want to run a P series card, you need to upgrade your OS.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

LOL I faced the same problem when Windows 2000 came out.

I thought... hey! I brought Windows 98 for 150 dollars! and I don't want to upgrade!

But eventually I did. 2000 is onky for games, but XP is just perfect. Tell me to go back to 98 is like telling me to use fire over electricity

Its kinda hard to accept this change at first, but you will eventually get used to it and not switching back to 9x systems.

[chaoliang]

I keep the win98 on a hidden partition just in case XP strikes. In this way I can be sure to still have a door to the outside world open when XP breaks down (this happens).

Another reason: If boot from CD fails, the easiest way to start is to use w98 start disk, I think. But it needs at least one FAT partition. Under XP I only use NTFS. I have only SCSI CD drives. On my new system, it just refuses to boot from it! Tried everything.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

No offend intended, but why would boot from CD and XP fail ?

[UtwigMU]

What about recovery console?

If you're hosed, you can still install Win2k or dualboot Win2k or another instance of XP and administer/backup your parition.

Right now I'm in the middle of upgrading and testing and I'm dualbooting:

Win2, Win2k test and recovery console.

Finaly I intend to dualboot 2k for work and XP for games.

If your SCSI CD-ROMs don't boot (or they do but card has no BIOS to boot from), then you can still add an IDE optical drive.

Also making win2k or XP boot floppies is trivial and XP can format 98 startup disk..

[Belwarrior]

no offense.. but having win98 as a backup OS has saved me a lot of time and problems..
most recently last week when the MSBLAST was making the rounds..(even though i rarely use it for anything else

[chaoliang]

For new installation, boot from CD is the quickest way I thought. As for XP: Well, I admit that XP gets always booted so far. That was becaused of my experience with W2K. It happened that W2K couldn't boot anymore while I must get access to some files on the boot partition. I convered the NTFS partition to FAT32, backed up the files and then reinstalled W2K.

Now I'm facing this problem: I would like to reinstall XP (windows media player and Photoshop don't work anymore) but can't boot from my SCSI CD (Asus P4C800 Deluxe + Adaptec 2940UW). It has always worked on my old system. I can use the floppies but they are toooooo slow. Boot from CD is just handy.

[UtwigMU]

Check Adaptec tech support.

What is your BIOS boot order?

Have you tried moving card up or down in PCI slots. Try the topmost PCI slot, check manual for PCI PIRQs and see which slot has lower INT adress than onboard controller and move card there.

Can you disable onboard IDE controller (such as Promise or Highpoint)?

[chaoliang]

BIOS boot order: I tried CD-Floppy, Floppy CD. Controller on PCI 1. Promise disabled. Maybe I should move the card to Slot 2. I heard that sometimes there are problems between Slot 1 and AGP slot.
During boot procedure the bootable CD can be detected but the system still says wrong boot device or no boot media.
P650 AGP uses the PCI Bus 1, the onboard Intel network adapter uses Bus 2, Adaptec uses Bus 3.

[Sasq]

Right now, on Sunday night, I can't remember exactly how to do this. My guess is it needs the scsi drivers for that card.

There is a way to put those drivers on the CD (make your own) but my brain is in Sunday mode - anyone feel like checking technet?

[chaoliang]

Since 2940UW has own BIOS and boot from CD must occure before OS is loaded, the driver should not be needed.

[chaoliang]

Some other points:
1. I use Boot Magic for dual booting. It needs a FAT partition to work. Is there any good alternate?

2. Since W98 is not supported by P650 anyway, I'm considering what you boys and girls have said here, that is, to give up W98. But before that, I must make sure to have one possibility to gain quick access to the files on NTFS boot partition, if XP makes troubles. Any suggestions?

[dZeus]

for #2
recovery console of the Windows XP cd... or a Windows Preinstall Environment (WinPE) CD.