Windows 98 SATA on the Intel D875PBZ Motherboard

First of all, thanks to Stinkerton and PickledDog for helping me troubleshoot this mess. I spent multiple hours trying to fix this all to no avail.

Essentially, the problem here is that the board defaults (which is likely if the CMOS battery is dead) will absolutely turbokill any chances of Windows 98 working right with this board. The board has three ATA channels, the two PATA channels and the ICH5 SATA channel. Windows 98 cannot recognize all three of these at once.

So, before you've done anything, you need to drop into the board's BIOS and set the following:

1. Tab over to Advanced.
2. Go to Drive Configuration.
3. Change ATA/IDE Configuration to [Legacy].
4. Determine what you want to do here. In my case, I have a CD-ROM drive on my primary PATA channel, so I selected SATA P0/P1, PATA Pri. If your optical drive (or whatever you have connected) is on the secondary PATA channel, you'd select SATA P0/P1, PATA Sec.
5. Hit F10 to save settings and exit. If your CMOS battery is dead, consider replacing it so you won't get caught out by this again.

This is only really necessary if you're using Win9x, as 2000 and XP should be able to see all three channels just fine. If you're running a hybrid system like I plan to do, definitely keep it to two channels so you don't chance Win98 eating itself.

Because in my case having three channels caused 98 to absolutely flip out and not recognize the PATA channels no matter how hard I tried to undo it, and wouldn't let me turn on DMA mode for the SATA SSD I have installed. Which for those who don't know: DMA is required for this or you'll have a bad time.

Speaking of, is DMA mode on? If not:

1. Right click My Computer, click on Properties. Go to Device Manager.
2. Find your SSD/HDD under Disk Drives. Right click. Go to Properties.
3. Go to the Settings tab and check DMA. Restart. That should be it.

And with that, hopefully, your drive performance won't be total trash and won't cause the entire system to hang when doing bigger file transfers!

(You might also want to consider Rudolph Loew's PTCHSATA, too.)