Seeking motherboard with good legacy support

Discussion in 'Gigabyte' started by Gary Clark, Dec 31, 2013.

  1. Gary Clark

    Gary Clark

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    Happy New Year,

    I am seeking a replacement motherboard for my desktop tower computer (AT/ATX form factor).

    I need a motherboard that:

    1. Has driver support for Windows 7 (I intend to run the Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit OS.)
    2. Also has legacy driver support for earlier Windows OSs as far back as Windows ME.
    3. Has at least one EIDE port for connection to IDE hard drives. (Other HDD connections can be SATA.)
    4. Has at least one PCI expansion slot (more would be better).
    5. Has onboard VGA graphics.
    6. Has all the other commonly found onboard features such as USB2, RS232 LAN, audio, etc.

    My big problem is finding the combination of Windows 7 driver support in a board having onboard EIDE hard drive capability. I currently am running Windows XP on an ASRock K8Upgrade-NF3 motherboard with an AMD Athelon 64 CPU in a 754 socket. This is a 2 GHz processor and is good enough and fast enough for all my purposes. I would be happy to keep the existing system if I could get Windows 7 drivers for it. But I can't get the drivers.

    I run a multi-boot system that currently has both Windows XP and Windows ME. I need ME to run some old software that cannot be upgraded and which I need to use. However I have never been able to boot to Windows ME from a SATA hard drive. I tried it and it just would not work. So I need to keep my operating systems on an IDE hard drive. That is why I need a motherboard with at least one IDE hard drive port.

    My intent is to set up a triple-boot system with each OS on a separate partition that can boot to Windows ME, Windows XP and Windows 7. This is why I need legacy driver support.

    Since I can't seem to get a motherboard with a 754 processor socket that also has drivers for Windows 7, I suppose I will have to buy an new processor with the replacement motherboard. I would rather keep my existing processor but that does not seem possible based on the research I have done so far.

    Can anyone offer any help?

    Kind regards,
    Gary Clark
    Colorado Springs, CO
     
    Gary Clark, Dec 31, 2013
    #1
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