nForce 3 Storage Drivers for Win 9X

Hello everyone,

Im using an MSI NEO2 SOCKET 939 motherboard that has the nForce3 chipset, i cannot find any IDE or RAID drivers for my board, 98SE installs great but all the drives are running in compatibility mode due to no drivers being found, i tried the nForce chipset drivers but it seems theres only storage drivers for XP and Vista.

The board is supported by 98/ME on the MSI site so i can’t understand this problem.

Thanks.

@POE_UK :
Please post the HardwareIDs of your on-board nForce SATA IDE (or RAID) Controller.

Hello, this is the board, Neo2

im not sure what hardware ID means

@POE_UK :
The usability of a specific driver depends on the HardwareIDs (VendorID+DeviceID) of the related device (and not on the specific model name of the mainboard).
This is the way how to get the HardwareIDs of the on-board NVIDIA nForce IDE or RAID Controller:
Run the Device Manager, expand the sections "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and - if applicable - "Storage Controllers".
Then do a right-click onto all listed devices with the word "Controller" in their name and choose the following options: "Properties" > "Details" > "Property" > "HardwareIDs".

Right ok thanks, soon as my new 4200+ cpu arrives ill do this and post it here.

@Fernando

I installed win xp and got the hardware ids here, thank you.

nForce3 250 Serial ATA Controller (v2.6)

Hardware Ids

PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E3&SUBSYS_02501462&REV_A2
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E3&SUBSYS_02501462
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E3&CC_010185
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E3&CC_0101




nForce3 250 Parallel ATA Controller (v2.6)

Hardware Ids

PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E5&SUBSYS_02501462&REV_A2
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E5&SUBSYS_02501462
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E5&CC_01018A
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E5&CC_0101


@POE_UK :
Attached is the 32bit NVIDIA nForce IDE driver v4.46 WHQL for Win2k, which supports your on-board nForce3 S-ATA and P-ATA Controller.
Good luck!

32bit NVIDIA nForce IDE driver v4.46 for Win2k.rar (146 KB)

Will it work on windows 98?

thanks.

Since this driver has been designed by NVIDIA for Windows 2000, I suspect, that it will work with Win98 as well.
Only a Win98 user can verify, whether I am right or wrong.

Win 98 works great on this board until you add any drive to the sata port next to the one you install windows on, then it starts to run in compatibility mode, the board has 4 sata ports (2 controllers) if i add a hdd to the second controller it works ok, very weird issue.

@Fernando

After days of troubleshooting this issue of win98 running so bad ive finally found out what the problem is:

ACPI

If i enable ACPI in the BIOS win98se crashes once installed, if i disable ACPI it runs perfect and very fast.

so the question here is i have tried the win98 setup /j switch at the dos prompt to install 98, and on the first install screen it says setup.exe /j is not a supported command. looking online this command is supposed to enable ACPI in the OS but i cannot get it to work.

@POE_UK :
Since I am not an expert reagarding your ACPI problem, you should use the “Search” box of the Forum to find a solution.
AFAIK the replacement of the original ACPI driver named acpi.sys by a modded variant may solve your issue. You can find a lot of information about this topic within >this< very voluminous thread.
Good luck!

Thanks mate, ill look into this, at least i know what the issue is now at last,

ive got two of these neo2 platinum (b)otherboards that are new old stock, ones got a dualcore athlon 4200+ for XP x64 and the other a singlecore a64 3500+ for 98