This is making me tear my hair out! When I replaced the motherboard and processor in my system, Win 98 adapted just fine. Now, owing to Win 98 being Win 98, the time has come when it needs a serious re-install to get round a few performance issues and odd behaviour (all right, crashing).

But, dammit, everytime I do a fresh install I get MS-DOS compatibility mode on the wretched HD. Device manager shows OK on the VIA IDE Bus Master Controller, but exclamation marks on both IDE channels. I've tried the drivers from the CD that came with the wretched motherboard (and there's a challenge when you're in MS-DOS compatibililty mode); I've tried downloading the latest "this'll fix it oh no it bleedin' won't" driver from VIA, I've tried every darned driver Windows has.

No joy. Those cheerful yellow circles are there, large as life and twice as ugly, announcing that they 'have a problem'. And, yes, MS-DOS compatibility mode. And hangs, and crashes and 16-bit CD-ROM drivers making the thing fall over as soon as you breathe.

So - anyone know the solution?

Other info - VIA chipset, AMD Duron 750, 128MB of PC133, ATA-33 HDD. Yes, I'm using the nice new blue IDE ribbon cable for the HDD, even though it's not ATA-66 or 100.

Run regedit. Search for "noide" and delete it.

Then run sysedit and open system.ini,
scroll down to [386Enh] and add the line

32BitDiskAccess=on

If it isn't there already

Go into Device Manager and delete everything that has VIA and anything that has a ! next to it then reboot. Then reinstall VIA 4 in 1 driver. I had similar problem with VIA and deleted every entry that had VIA Including bus controllers et. al. and went into add/remove programs and uninstall anything that had VIA before doing the above. Finally before rebooting I also made sure to go into bios and reset defaults on the mb. Rebooting allowed Win 98 to reinstall anything that had ! and then reinstalled the VIA 4 in 1 and got things running finally. Took 3 tries before I finally got it right. Hope you can get it on the first one. Also don't get the latest drivers if the original ones worked OK. That is where I had my problem compounded. If it worked ok Before don't change it.
HTH