Chicken
08-04-2001, 09:58 PM
Well, I'll try my best to describe it (rather long but I'm trying to give as much info as I can). First, the only OS's I have are win95 full, win98 upgrade and just got win98 full from a teacher at work, so I've installed that instead of the win95>98 thing. I've got WinXP but I just got it and not sure that will help much, as the drivers don't seem to be for that either.
The drivers that came on the disk are only for NT/2000 (and other but I'm not going to use it for the other ones).
So we're working with 98 as the OS at the moment, and as I mentioned, the drivers that came with it aren't for 98. The video is ATI Rage-XL (PCI based VGA controller with 4MB of PC100 SDRAM). I bought another video card (32MB) but stange things happened (the same things I'll discuss later actually), and I decided to download and install the 8MB exe driver file for ATI Rage-XL off their site. So that seemed to work, in theory, whether it really does, I'm not entirely sure.
So anywhooo...
I installed the win98 full, the driver I downloaded for the video, bought a sound card, installed drivers, etc. On board NIC wasn't supported, bought another D-Link card, installed it. The only thing that was flagged was:
PCI bus
Windows could not load the driver for this device because the computer is reporting two PCI.VXD bus types (Code 2). Contact your computer manufacturer to get an updated BIOS for your computer.
Well... barring that, the computer seemed to work. I then installed the HD (Maxtor 29 gig IDE) and the CD-RW drive I had. Seemed fine, I could access everything okie. After cruising some forums for about 3 hours the screen started loading very slowly. Images appearing slow, pages appearing in parts, very slowly, until it just stopped. Odd. This is instantly what I experienced with the other video card (I thought the card was flogged and removed it, got the drivers for the on board video and everything seemed to be fine, until it wasn't).
Crashed out and rebooted, safe mode, reboot to see if it would come up and windows just hung. Crashed out, safe mode, killed everything, backed up config files and restart. Hung. Back to safe mode, reboot, step by step without config.sys and autoexec.bat and it worked. Added everything one by one, no problems, conflicts etc. (besides the PCI bus).
Then it started to show signs of the video slowdown again. I thought I'd head it off this time and reboot. No chance. Windows hung, had to repeat all of the above.
I've gotten random errors about the file system on the IDE, something about it not being supported, and as of right now I think I have everything disabled except the D-LINK PCI NIC card.
There were two display adapters, though I disabled them once or twice, seems to be only one now and I can't disable it. Not sure why. I've reinstalled just about any driver that I thought could be causing a problem, including the ATI Rage-XL driver.
There were three Hard Disk controllers listed (or at least three things listed under Hard Disk controllers), now there is one. I had disabled the other two and this one, though it seems I can't disable this now, but it is flagged with the following error (come to think of it, the random error message I mentioned above had something to do with this, but I've forgotten exactly what it said). Anyhow, the error is:
Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller
This device is disabled because the BIOS for the device did not give it an IRQ (Interrupt Request). (Code 29.)
You must enable the device in the BIOS. See your hardware documentation for details, or contact your computer manufacturer to get an updated BIOS.
So I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to fix this. Not sure if Windows 2000 would solve all my problems?, or if there is something else I can do, etc. I beleive I got the update BIOS but unsure how to actually update it (did this once for a laptop but it was so long ago that I can't recall).
Currently with no video support (well I guess it has some, I can see 16 colors, heh), and everything that can be disabled - disabled, it works. The only thing on is the D-LINK NIC card. Although I've gotten it to work, something happens and then either rebooting hangs, (once it hung and then automagically after about 3 hours windows booted up, heh, another time it just shut down - go figure?)
Any ideas, thoughts, pity? :(
The drivers that came on the disk are only for NT/2000 (and other but I'm not going to use it for the other ones).
So we're working with 98 as the OS at the moment, and as I mentioned, the drivers that came with it aren't for 98. The video is ATI Rage-XL (PCI based VGA controller with 4MB of PC100 SDRAM). I bought another video card (32MB) but stange things happened (the same things I'll discuss later actually), and I decided to download and install the 8MB exe driver file for ATI Rage-XL off their site. So that seemed to work, in theory, whether it really does, I'm not entirely sure.
So anywhooo...
I installed the win98 full, the driver I downloaded for the video, bought a sound card, installed drivers, etc. On board NIC wasn't supported, bought another D-Link card, installed it. The only thing that was flagged was:
PCI bus
Windows could not load the driver for this device because the computer is reporting two PCI.VXD bus types (Code 2). Contact your computer manufacturer to get an updated BIOS for your computer.
Well... barring that, the computer seemed to work. I then installed the HD (Maxtor 29 gig IDE) and the CD-RW drive I had. Seemed fine, I could access everything okie. After cruising some forums for about 3 hours the screen started loading very slowly. Images appearing slow, pages appearing in parts, very slowly, until it just stopped. Odd. This is instantly what I experienced with the other video card (I thought the card was flogged and removed it, got the drivers for the on board video and everything seemed to be fine, until it wasn't).
Crashed out and rebooted, safe mode, reboot to see if it would come up and windows just hung. Crashed out, safe mode, killed everything, backed up config files and restart. Hung. Back to safe mode, reboot, step by step without config.sys and autoexec.bat and it worked. Added everything one by one, no problems, conflicts etc. (besides the PCI bus).
Then it started to show signs of the video slowdown again. I thought I'd head it off this time and reboot. No chance. Windows hung, had to repeat all of the above.
I've gotten random errors about the file system on the IDE, something about it not being supported, and as of right now I think I have everything disabled except the D-LINK PCI NIC card.
There were two display adapters, though I disabled them once or twice, seems to be only one now and I can't disable it. Not sure why. I've reinstalled just about any driver that I thought could be causing a problem, including the ATI Rage-XL driver.
There were three Hard Disk controllers listed (or at least three things listed under Hard Disk controllers), now there is one. I had disabled the other two and this one, though it seems I can't disable this now, but it is flagged with the following error (come to think of it, the random error message I mentioned above had something to do with this, but I've forgotten exactly what it said). Anyhow, the error is:
Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller
This device is disabled because the BIOS for the device did not give it an IRQ (Interrupt Request). (Code 29.)
You must enable the device in the BIOS. See your hardware documentation for details, or contact your computer manufacturer to get an updated BIOS.
So I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to fix this. Not sure if Windows 2000 would solve all my problems?, or if there is something else I can do, etc. I beleive I got the update BIOS but unsure how to actually update it (did this once for a laptop but it was so long ago that I can't recall).
Currently with no video support (well I guess it has some, I can see 16 colors, heh), and everything that can be disabled - disabled, it works. The only thing on is the D-LINK NIC card. Although I've gotten it to work, something happens and then either rebooting hangs, (once it hung and then automagically after about 3 hours windows booted up, heh, another time it just shut down - go figure?)
Any ideas, thoughts, pity? :(