I finally carried out a fresh installation of Windows 98SE on my well-used 600E. It has a 6gb disk, which I think is the original, and ... uh ... it's kinda slow. The disk, I mean.

Mea culpa. I was in a hurry and didn't read the instructions for the w98sfdit.exe package. It looked as if they were mainly about installing Win98SE in APM mode. Well, I always install Win98 as APM anyway, so I didn't copy the list of files to the installation cabs directory. Hmm, maybe that was a mistake. :(

I ran the apm2apm script right away, before I even looked at device manager, so I don't have any extra unresolved devices in the device manager table. What I do have there under Hard Disk Controllers is two copies of the Win98SE (bog-) Standard IDE/ESDI Hard Disk Controller driver. For the disk, I have a generic IDE disk type <7 (huh?) for the disk under Disk Drives.

On the Settings page for the disk, there is NO tickbox for DMA. It's not even greyed out; it's just not there at all.

I tested the disk with my old benchmark friend, HD Tach (v2.52, a later version blue-screened). I got a miserable 3.3 mbps burst speed and about the same, 3.6 mbps, for sequential speed. Random access time was 21.7ms. CPU utilization was 92.7%, making it pretty clear that I'm in PIO mode, not DMA.

I'm afraid I know the answer already, but is there any (relatively) easy way to install a decent DMA-enabled driver for the disk controller in this little guy, or am I going to have to bite the bullet and start all over from scratch with yet another fresh Win98 installation?

Thanks for the help!