Old Motherboard problems

[davidgrand]

I'm putting together a old system so my grandmother can use email. I have all the essentials pieces however I think my motherboard is bad. It's a MS5168 VER1.1 Maybe by SIS not sure. I have tested all components in another system and all work fine however when I try to boot the P166MMX with 32mEDO a 4M Diamond Vid card a 4X CD, a 2G WD HD I have problems. The system will start to boot from the CD however when the win98 disk gets to the menu choice to enable cd support it will freeze when it tries to execute the oaktechnologies cd driver. Is there some way to determine if the ide controllers are bad? Or where do I go from here? The system reads the hard drive and the cd. It just doesn't want to work.

[Peter M]

Hi!

The MS5168 is made by MSI. Visit www.msi.com.tw and see if there is a BIOS update and a manual.

Chipset is SiS 5591, a 83 MHz chipset. Drivers are at www.sis.com.tw, but these won't help you until you got your Windows installed.

There is nothing that keeps W98 from being installed with this chipset unless something is broken. Did that last week on an equally old (one year :-) Gigabyte 5SG - same chipset.

Regards, Peter

[Rookie]

I think there are some cd roms that the 98 boot disk will not work with. You said in your post it was a 4x cd rom? I rememeber reading that 98's boot disk has many (but not all cd rom drivers...)
Try bootdisk.com and see if they have one for you- check out the faq and howto...
Hope that helps.
Rookie

[davidgrand]

Will check out the Sites to see if there are any bios upgrades out there. I've had cd-rom exp like "rookie" described however, I tested all components in this system in another working system and all was well to include boot so I feel the Motherboard must be the prob/IDE controllers
Thanks for your help

[hesscomputer]

Make sure that the hard drive and Cdrom are connected to the same IDE controller .
On some boards with especially Sis Chips you can not jump over the IDE Win9x will not install and just hang.
With this I mean using the primary IDE C:\ D:\ Controller only while you try to setup.
Happend before to me on this kind of board.
when you finished and installed Win9x then try to move the CDrom to the second IDE Controller ,should work because of the busmaster installed by Windows.
Another thing is to copy the complete setup folder from the Win98 Cdrom to the hard drive but you have to create a folder like
C:\Setup\Win98 first on a Fat32 partition this should not take more than 120 MB .
then run setup from it,may this help you to start to get Windows installed.
And don't forget to unplug the CDrom while you run setup , that's the major thing to find out what's wrong.

[davidgrand]

Hey, I've been tied up with other things but your info on the fact that they need to be on the same controller may help thanks. I'll try it.