I've used external controllers such as Promise Ultra 66 and/or Promise Ultra 133. Let's say I'm not using the motherboard's IDE0 or IDE1. I have only a hard-drive on the controller card's IDE0 and perhaps a CD-ROM on the IDE1 so that both are master. How does the computer know which device to boot to? Is it from the master boot record or the bios or both? Currently, I have an empty (new) hard-drive, unformatted. The card picks up the hard-drive on IDE0 as D0, and then the CD-ROM on IDE1 as D3 (not D2). I actually need to boot to the CD to install an operating system. Should I try switching the cables? Currently, it just says no system disk, etc.., hit enter. I agree that the hard-drive is empty and has no boot sector info yet. Somehow I need to boot but my floppy drive controller seems burnt. Perhaps 3 floppy drives are all bad but I doubt it so I am trying to install an operating system such as WIndows 95 or Windows 98 from scratch. My last incantation of this PC ran off of an Ultra 66 for about a year, then one day it just quit. Nothing but troubles since. I had originally flashed a newer bios that should have supported larger hard-drives like my 80GB but it never worked. I don't know why. I simply cannot find anyone who has an old floppy/i/o controller chip, the W83877f. There are companies but they have escrow payments. I tried ASUS tech support but I cannot get through. Should I plug some external bootable drive into a parallel port. I'm not sure what to do here. I will not throw away a motherboard simply because an onboard port or two doesn't work. I believe in fixing things. I am still trying to get the Winbond W83877f chip, that would help a lot. Any ideas appreciated. Perhaps I should try to find another computer and slave the hard-drive first to get it's boot sector bootable so the Ultra can be booted to. But that's not easy with my other pcs. ??

Thank you, I DID check out the Promise Knowledge base and under Ultra133TX2 I found the following:

KNOWLEDGE BASE ARTICLE

How can I Boot from Ultra133TX2, CMOS, SCSI, Configuration?

Product: Ultra133TX2
Platform: all
Firmware/Bios Version: all
Cause: change the Boot Sequence in your CMOS, PCI Slot preference, Motherboard Compataibility.
Solution: There are two ways to make the Ultra100 be the bootable device. One way is to make sure there are no HDDs on the motherboard controllers. The motherboard will not find a bootable device, and allow the Ultra100 to boot. The other way is to change the Boot Sequence in your CMOS to boot from SCSI first. Since the system will see the Ultra100 as a SCSI controller, this will tell the motherboard to ignore it’s own controllers and allow our card to be the boot device. Another way of seeing the card as the bootable is from a hard drive sub-menu. It may appear under the "other" category. This last way seems to be more common in recent motherboards. Check with your MB manufacturer as to how the PCI bootable card will be seen by the boot priority selection of their motherboard. Then select it as the first boot device when you want to boot to the drive attached to the first connector.
END KNOWLEDGE BASE ARTICLE

In my case, there are no HDDs on the motherboard controllers so it's already going over to the Ultra. I guess I'll try switching
the cables so that it tries the CD-ROM first. I can also set it to SCSI in the bios although in my case it may or may not
be necessary, probably not necessary.

I guess what I was looking for was, will the thing boot off of a cd-rom? But I now realize that my homework is to find out
that question. I hope the cd-rom doesn't expect a floppy disk as the first thing. I guess I just have some jitters before I
do this and needed some calm because not a living thing has been working well with that motherboard since I fried
some of the ports on it.

So here comes the next chapter. I switched the cables at the controller so that now the CD/DVD is on IDE1 and the hard-drive is on IDE2 (the controller card uses 1 and 2, not 0 and 1). I rebooted and it picks up something as D2 on IDE1 and D3 on
IDE2. So it finds devices. But then I get the message:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER, the same message (I alluded to) before.

So now I have to diagnose the problem further, just what I didn't want.
1) Is it that the controller cannot boot to a CD?
2) Is the CDROM not really working - it seems like it should work since it's picked up by the BIOS and it's almost
brand new.
3) Is the CD containing Windows 95OSR2 not really bootable?

One thing I wonder is why it sets it to be D2, why isn't it D1?
There isn't any information in Promise's Knowledge base about booting to a CD or DVD. Now I'm back where I started.

After some hunting around, I believe that 3) may be the correct answer - my Windows 95OSR2 CD may not be bootable. I believe
they were bootable starting with Windows 98 or 98SE. Perhaps I need to invent some sort of bootable CD. Windows 95
normally needs DOS in there somewhere since it sits on top of DOS. There are bootable floppies (and even ones with
CD-ROM drivers) but I don't have a working floppy drive.

Perhaps there is a way to get Windows to boot to a CD - I hope I don't need to put it on my motherboard - I fear that
my motherboard controller does not work anymore. But I would still need a bootable CD.

So now I need to either use a Windows 98 CD (I don't have a bootable one that isn't just an upgrade) or try to make
a DOS version of a CD with the system files and config.sys/autoexec.bat and put MSCDEX.exe of Microsoft and
the driver for the CD on it. I guess I can just go with Windows 98 for now but I will need to buy a disk. It would
be cool if I can make a bootable disk with just DOS on it though. Later on.

Well, the Windows 98 upgrade CD did not get booted to either and I even set the HDD Sequence Boot First to SCSI. Still
no go. Options now?
1. Check jumpers - perhaps the CD needs some sort of jumper?
2. Find a hard-drive that already has Windows or DOS or something on it.
3. Keep trying to fix the floppy drives but I keep buying floppy drives and they don't work.
4. Is there a parallel port way of booting to some external drive?
5. ??

I decided to put the CD-ROM on IDE0 (on the motherboard). It's now a slave (jumpers). Anyway, the computer did not lock up, it
just said:
Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : Failure ...
I now need to hunt down why this is happening.
1. Why is it a slave? Jumper?
2. Is the CD-ROM disk bootable?
3. If above ARE NOT the cause, then it would be the CD-ROM or the controller.

So there's still hope. I just didn't want to use my motherboard since I had had lockups. Perhaps the lockups were that
the BIOS couldn't understand an 80GB drive. I had upgraded the BIOS but I might need very special settings for a
hard-drive. So now I'm just trusting that my IDE0 on the motherboard might be able to control a CD-ROM drive.
At least it's not locking the computer up. I just need to keep trying different CDs and perhaps there really is a jumper setting.
It would not surprise me at all if I jumpered it as a slave since it was the 2nd cd-rom on this computer when it had
2 cd drives (I guess the other one might work still, I don't know).
So I guess I'll try jumpers and more cds.

I changed the jumper on the CD to master, but still
Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : Failure ... with either the Windows 98SE upgrade or the Windows95 OEM OSR2 CDs. I need
to look for some other bootable CDs or perhaps burn one somehow.
Now the CD is picked up as a master on it's cable select (blue-end) cable.

I have heard others say that the Windows 98 SE upgrade CD is not bootable. So likely the Windows 95 OSR2 OEM CD is also not bootable. I just need to do a sort of slipstream of an OS with some CD burner software. Perhaps there's still a chance.

Enter AllBootDisks.com - I burnt an .iso of Win95b_bootdisk.iso to a CD with either Infrarecorder or ImageBurn, I cannot
remember which I used - I use both. Now I've tested that my CD-RW/DVD-RW is working. It was a perfect boot to the
A:\> prompt. Remember when you burn that autoexec.bat and config.sys may be hidden even if you have show hidden files
because XP has an extra flag. So don't worry, they are there. You may want to try WinRAR or some other iso or archive
tool to view that the autoexec.bat/config.sys are there. You may want to edit those files first. This would mean extracting
the archive I guess and then reassembling it back as an iso before burning. I'm not an expert at using these tools. So now
I have to decide if I want to try my Windows95OSR2 OEM disk or just extract some files and then proceed with my 98SE
upgrade. I wish I remembered which files I will need to take out of the cabinet to satisfy the upgrade requirement. I think
I will go with the 98SE FAT32 this time. But I would really love to have a non-IE browser system. I would love to install
OSR2 (the slim version without IE4). I have to decide soon! Later on.

Wow, deja-vu, I now realize that the 80GB drive is shown as 74GB - 64GB = 10GB - I hadn't realized that the fdisk/format
commands that were incorrect in Windows 95 hadn't been fixed in Windows 95OSR2 and Windows 98/98SE. So now
I have to find some way of getting the "package" to give me those files. AllBootDisks.com versions of these have the
incorrect fdisk/format (the ones not yet patched). So I need to build new isos since I don't yet have a floppy or
hard-drive to copy files to. I don't want to partition yet. Tedious!

Not to be a royal pain, but does anyone have the proper fdisk/format .exes rather than the packaged version downloaded
from Microsoft's site? I guess the Windows 95OSR2 versions are the same or similar and I would like those version too. I need to put these in as a replacement to a cd image. I don't have a burner to take them from some Windows 98 computer. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

Now I've WinRARed the microsoft file: 263044USA8.exe and I have it's contents to pick through in a directory.
There are 12 files, among them fdisk.98g and fdisk.98s, these were created on May 19th and May 18th of the
year 2000 so they are updates to the original fdisk which is much earlier. There are also some dlls and some .inf
files there. So we're getting there.
I guess I will need one for the format command since this has some bugs but perhaps I can get started soon.