Thanks for all input, guys!
As for motherboard beeing the culprit, I'm not so sure, but maybe the newer cards are less forgiving or lack 'legacy bios communications skills' ?
I've found an older IDE only card(1999ish), 66mhz bus, that proves to actually work perfectly with Doom2, no crash.
And boots quite fast as well, no waiting at all apart from the quick show off from the second bios - of connected hardware found.
As for "..the cards installed in the order they are.", does that mean which slot ? The mobo has been pretty vacant during these tests, only the very bare minimum.
NO other cards apart from the lone PCI graphics card, and they are far apart.
Hmm, maybe I'll test that(placement/slot) out, but the old IDE card mentioned above used the same slot, with nothing else changed, so... 😐
swaaye wrote:These SATA/PATA cards almost always have their own BIOS that loads after the system BIOS and sets up the ports to be usable without special drivers.
Any particular card models/chipsets that has proven to actually boot from SATA?
VIA6421A sure doesn't boot from the IDE port - much less shows any BIOS info (nothing at ALL happen, just regular POST which asks for something bootable, card just sits there like dead). And there ARE 2 chips on the card, one smaller one I suspect is meant to pass as a bios.
With that in mind, any reason SATA would happen to work when IDE does not, when all ports origin from the same chip ?
(I have no bootable SATA disk atm, hence my testing is slightly skewed... 😜 )