What's the secret to booting Win98SE with a Tekram DC-395U card?

[dkozloski]

After years of successful Adaptec installations I decided to try one of those wonderful "cheap" DC-395UW Tekram cards and evidently I'm not smart enough to make it work. I made a custom Win98SE boot disc and got the installation done up through copying all the files but at the first reboot the system hangs. I tried the latest Tekram BIOS and drivers and I pulled everything out but the essentials and it makes no difference. The only way I could get beyond this point was to install an Adaptec 2940UW. It would boot on up and finish the installation no problem. At this point I manually installed Tekram drivers and reinstalled the Tekram card. The thing booted a couple of times but I tried to install some more hardware and drivers and it hung again. I could pull out the Tekram card and install the Adaptec and nurse it to life, then reinstall the Tekram but it would soon die. As far as Tekram goes, I'm not impressed.
System Specs:
ASUS K7M
Athlon classic 700, not overclocked
Seagate ST19101W Cheetah drive
NEC SCSI CDROM drive
128meg Corsair PC100 memory
Sparkle 300W PS
Antec KS288 case

 

[Durron]

What kind of video card do you have? I had a simliar problem where it would basically stall while loading WIndows 98 and it was because of a driver incompatiblity between my Voodoo3 3500TV and the Tekram SCSI drivers. (found out by removing the display driver at one point and it booted up). The fix I found was to install the Symbios drivers instead of Tekram's drivers for the SCSI card. Try it out.

-Durron

 

[dkozloski]

I went all the way to an old 512k ISA buss VGA card and it made no difference. The tekram DC-395UW uses the Tekram S1040 chip and not Symbios. Thanks.

 

[Radarman]

Hello dkozloski,
I remember when I built this machine ( Celeron 300a @ 450 Mhz ), when I went to load the Win98 os, I didn't have any cd rom support,
I had to load the DOS drivers for the Tekram DC-390F adapter card,
loaded Win98 from CD, and then had to load the Win 98 drivers for the DC-390F, cuz all of my drives were running in compatability mode. The Tekram has been an excellent SCSI Adapter, no problems.
Radarman

 

[dkozloski]

Radarman, if you read my original post you will see that I said I made a custom Win98SE boot disc and got the operating system installed up to the first reboot and then the system hung. The only way it would do anything at that point was to take out the Tekram card and put in an Adaptec. The Tekram card I have is a DC-395UW which has some kind of Tekram chip and not a Symbios. If I had to make a wild guess I would say that compatibility mode does not work with this card so the only way you can get it up and running is to get it up and running first with Adaptec. Then it will boot once or twice and then crap out again.