Ok, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to see a list of drivers you used and for what. If I understand correctly, thing thing basically has two chipsets (Cyrix MediaGX and CyberPro 5000-series) that provide audio and video features, but not all of the features of either set is being used by this design. Anyway, when I installed from Win98, it showed two video drivers both labelled as generic PCI-compatible VGA. It also had four devices listed as unknown devices: a PCI Bus, two sound cards (forgot what Windows called them) and one listed simply as "Unknown Device".
Here is my "journal" of what I've done thus far. Please let me know if any of this is familiar and if you have any sugestions. Maybe this will be of help to someone else installing Win98 on this puppy. This has certainly been an excercise in troubleshooting hardware and driver conflicts... ;) I've also gotten lots of practice with desoldering braid doing the VGA and PS/2 mods and cleaning out the contacts for the PCI slot. I still have to desolder a PCI socket from a dead motherboard when I have several hours to spare... ;)
I installed Win98 (full, not lite) and it hung in the two places mentioned above. When it came up for the first "real" boot, it hung. I did a logged boot and it was hanging while loading the IDE drivers. I booted into safe mode, disabled the primary and secondary channels and let it use the real-mode drivers. This seemed to work just fine and let me come up in Win98. I'd like to find 32-bit IDE drivers if such exist. Bagger mentioned the Cyrix WebPlayer driver. I'll have to look into that.
When it came up, I noticed a couple of things. There is a A: drive that shows up as a removable drive. I don't have any clue what that is. Maybe the 2MB NVRAM mentioned in another thread that sits above the 8MB main memory? Maybe the SmartCard? When I tried to open it, it said it wasn't formatted and asked if I wanted to format it. Since I didn't know what it was, I didn't. ;) I noticed the 2 generic video drivers and the 4 unknown devices mentioned above. The video driver it was using gave me an option of 2-color and 16-color at 640x480 only.
I used a USB keyboard/mouse converter and got a PS/2 wireless mouse working on the USB port. I also decided I would see if I could get a USB network adapter working, so I hooked up an SMC EZ2102USB/ETH 10Mbps adapter, loaded the drivers and voila! I was able to browse my network and the internet.
Next I figured I would see if I could load some more appropriate drivers for the hardware. I installed the Cyrix MediaGX driver set. It gave me several options (Joystick, PCI Bridge, Graphics, and Audio for sure. Looking in the binaries I also see settings for Miniport and UDMA although I don't recall these). I selected everything... I guess I shouldn't have. Win98 setup had loaded a generic Joystick port driver, so I didn't figure this one would hurt. I knew I wanted the Audio and the Graphics. I also knew the PCI Bus was listed as an unknown device. When I did this, Windows redetected 2 unknown Audio devices as an XpressAudio 16-bit sound and an XpressAudio PCI Bridge. It redetected the PCI Bus as a Cyrix PCI Bus. It also added about 6 IRQ holder for PCI Steering entries. One of the Generic VGA's was reconfigured as a Cyrix MediaGX. The only device still listed as unknown was the one helpfully labelled "Unknown Device" (I love when Windows does this, especially when you get several at once.). The other VGA adapter was also still showing as a generic.
After doing all this, I rebooted as suggested and... it locked up again... grrr... I did another logged boot. It was locking up at PCI.VXD. I changed the Cyrix PCI bus driver to the Generic Microsoft one which Win98 said was compatible (funny that Win98 knew about this but didn't configure it during setup). Same thing. I uninstalled the Cyrix driver set, removed the PCI Bus and all the IRQ holders from Device Manager and rebooted. It came up in Win98 and re-detected the PCI bus as a Cyrix PCI Bus (odd since I supposedly uninstalled the drivers) and only added two IRQ holders (IRQ 9 and 10). It asked me to reboot and promptly locked loading PCI.VXD. Sigh... I disabled both of the IRQ holders.
It still locked up, but a logged boot showed that it was making it past PCI.VXD this time. It was making it all the way to mmdevldr.vxd. I only half noticed it at the time, but it wasn't locking while loading mmdevldr, but immediately after SUCESSFULLY loading mmdevldr. Don't know why it was locking. I figured I'd disable the XpressAudio 16-bit driver. I then got an error message during boot about configmg and that the system would need to be rebooted. I disabled the XpressAudio PCI Bridge and got rid of the configmg error, but the system still locks after loading mmdevldr.vxd. The bootlog indicates that it loads the driver and starts it successfully, so I'm not sure where it's hanging.
I guess my next step is to remove the inf files created by the CyrixMediaGX driver installer and delete the devices. That should get them detected as Unknown again. If that will let me boot, then I'll try re-installing just the video driver, just the sound driver, etc. to see if I can get at least some of them working. Mevanson, I'd be interested to know what options you chose when installing the Cyrix MediaGX drivers. I downloaded these from the same place you show for i2c.exe. Not sure if there is a better place or not. Any suggestions you can make would be helpful.
NarShadda
