Thinkpads Forum

Controllers.

For reasons of specific needs I decided to freshly install Windows 98 SE on the Thinkpad 600.
Yes under the device manager I am showing three hard disk controllers;

Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
- this one has exclamation mark

Standard Bus Mastering IDE Hard Disk Controller
Standard Bus Mastering IDE Hard Disk Controller

I think one or the other is being used which seems to work fine but I can't figure out which one. Maybe it's just some Win98 thing. Doesn't seem to crash to my recollection but would like to dig into this thing more.

Anyone else experienced this?

IBM only has information on improvements such as PCMCIA cards and Infrared communications.

The listing of two IDE controllers is normal in a standard Windows 98/98SE installation. You can compare your ThinkPad 600 setup to the Default Device Manager listing - ThinkPad 600 on the IBM support site.

The Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller shows up incorrectly under the list of hard disk controllers because you have not yet applied the APM2APM.reg registry patch file from the Windows 98 "supplemental files disk" properly:
Windows 98 installation supplement files - ThinkPad 600, 760, 765, 770

These issues are discussed in several earlier threads, for e.g.:
Intel 82371ab/eb pci bus master IDE controller conflict
and
TP 770X, 98SE, IRQ conflict ???

Phil.

That did it. I would have thought I would see something easy to find on Lenovo website. Like special notes for reinstalling Windows 98 etc. etc.