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How to get the Bus Master drivers, USB and AGP working. If you are running Win98 - Plug and Play - no patches needed. If you are running Win95b - OSR2.1 or 2.5 - You have work to do. Follow the OSR2 directions below. OSR 2.1 and 2.5 have the USB supplement on the CD. If it was not installed yet, it is in the Other\Updates folder of the CD. However, the version that accompanies OSR2.1 is old and should be updated. Go to the OSR2 FAQ section on USB for links to sources of the latest USB supplement version. If you are running Win95b - OSR2 - You have work to do. You will notice that there are a few unknown devices (yellow question mark) listed under "Other Devices" in Device Manager: ? PCI Serial Device This is the Universal Serial Bus port. The listing may be different from this, but you should be able to tell. If you are not planning on running any USB devices or an AGP video card, you can leave this alone. However, the USB update which makes the USB port functional just happens to be needed to gain AGP support. Your AGP video card will "work" without this, but it will not use any of the AGP specific attributes. ? PCI BridgeThis is part of the 430TX and later (440FX, 440LX...) chipset functionality. Again, you can leave this alone and compute away, but you may notice that you don't have BM (Bus Mastering) controller capability showing if you look at the Hard Drive Controllers listing. Several motherboard manufacturers include a file on their setup disks to fix this, named something like PC-TX.EXE or TX-chipset update. If you have this, go ahead and apply it - even for LX and BX boards. It may not be needed, since a later Intel update may take care of this, but at this time it is not clear, and doing the TX update before the later Intel update does no harm. So, here's the process.
That should fix everything and give you full USB, AGP and Bus Mastering IDE controllers. NOTE: I strongly recommend you do NOT apply the Intel version 3.0x BM drivers. Many motherboard manufacturers include them on their setup CD. These drivers provide LESS functionality than the native OSR2 BM drivers, even though they are almost a year newer. Intel has not revised these drivers past 3.01 dated June 1997. The readme.txt file from that revision includes the following deadly information: ********************************************* * 8A. IDE DEVICES SUPPORTED BY THE DRIVER * ********************************************* The Intel PIIX Bus Master IDE driver supports only specific ATA/ATAPI device types. The Intel driver should not be installed if the system is equipped with any of the non-supported ATAPI devices. The Intel driver does not support the following types of device in the system: - ATAPI Tape Drives - ATAPI CD-ROM Changer Drives - ATAPI DVD-ROM Drives - ATAPI Writeable CD Drives - ATA/ATAPI ZIP*, LS-120*, Cartridge, Optical, Removable Media Drives - IDE Fixed Disk Drives larger than 8.4GBbytes <snip> Ed. Note: In other words, anybody interested in running an internal Zip drive, DVD, CD burner or CD changer - stay away. With my Creative Labs Encore DVD and SyQuest SparQ IDE installed, my system locked with a Windows protection error unless I unplugged these devices. The OSR2.x and Win98 native BM drivers have no such problems and provide at least as good performance. Use them. Once you have all the patches above installed, the native drivers will function perfectly. If you have installed the Intel BM drivers, there is an uninstall procedure in the readme.txt file. If you are running Win95, Win95a - Upgrade to Win95b (OSR2.x) then follow the direction there. If you are not going to be using an AGP video card or USB device, you can skip the upgrade to OSR2, but do apply the TX update (if available) and Intel Inf update as covered under the OSR2 section. Back to top
This page is last updated Sunday,
May 23, 2004 |
