Soyo 5EHM problem w/ CD-rom and AGP

[Draygus]

This is the 4th motherboard I have installed in the last year or so and by far the biggest pain in the *** I've had.

First question:
First off I install the motherboard and do a clean install of Win98. It recognizes the VIA chipset. The cd-rom drive works but no AGP. I say fine, and move to install the IRQ mapping drivers and the new bus master drivers. After installing the bus master drivers the CD-Rom drive no longer works. It's an 8x NEC that uses the default Windows 98 drivers. Any clue on how to make it work with the newer Bus Master drivers? I can live with the default windows drivers if you can answer the next question.

Second:
I install the new agp drivers I got off the Soyo website. I'm using a creative TNT agp card. Everything seems to work fine but whenever I try to run a game I get an illegal operation with the viagart.vxd. I check the version of this file and it is 2.9. I also tried the drivers straight off the VIA homepage.

I beg any of you with greater knowledge than I to shed some light upon this preplexing problem. (It's hard for me anyway). I have tried newer drivers for the video card and just about any driver I could find. I have also tried to modify every combination in the Bios that I could come up with.

Soyo 5EHM motherboard
K6-2 300
Creative Labs TNT agp
64 megs of PC100 sdram
Quantum 12.7 gig EX hard drive

Thx in advance

[JimS]

The VIA bus master drivers have trouble recognizing older CD players. I would set the channel that you have CD on(secondary?) to non busmastering. Go to Tom's Hardware Guide, under the storeage section there is some information on how to do this, in the bus mastering section. I would install the VIA AGP driver in normal mode, not turbo, it may help with your video problems. Also, be sure your BIOS is the latest, as well as video card driver.

[Ed_S]

I have same board, but not using AGP. had initial problem with it older NEC CD changer. Moved CD to tertiary IDE port on SB64 soundcard (ISA). Everything works great, also this allows 6 IDE devices, although cannot use this port for HD's as no bios configuration. Although ISA slower, the old 6X changer and my CD-R don't seem to be affected.