PCI on 486 boards was normally pretty craptastic. It was really early in PCI, and unlike VLB, integrated support really wasn't much of a thing.

I don't think the board is on it's way out, I just think it was always like that.

A lot of the time, when you add a PCI card, there is some sort of selection in BIOS labeled SCSI as far as booting goes because the PCI card is actually seen as an add-in SCSI card.

It would not surprise me one bit if that 486 board will only see stuff in the motherboard BIOS that is on the ISA bus.

IF it has an option to boot from SCSI AND you have a PCI card that has its own BIOS, you should be able to use a PCI card.

If not you are probably out of luck as far as booting or even using a PCI hard drive controller.

As far as it having issues detecting cards on cold boot, I would say to give the slot and card connectors a good cleaning. They are probably quite oxidized by now.

Folded printer paper so it is snug in the slot works wonders for actually cleaning the slot connectors. Just keep inserting/removing until it stops putting black lines on the paper.

Right. This BIOS does not have an option for changing boot order other than A: and C:, but it does have an option for PCI SCSI controller, which I tried enabling and disabling. The BIOS actually does load the IDE controller's option ROM. That's the part that has me really stumped. Why would it be able to execute the PCI card's BIOS, but then the PCI card can't find any drives? The PCI card's BIOS says no drives detected on every boot. I know there's little hope of getting the mainboard to ever detect drives on the PCI card, but that's not what I'm trying to do.

Also basically the only information I've been able to find on this board is here: http://th99.classic-computing.de/src/m/E-H/31811; the jumpers on board aren't labelled well. I had forgotten how tricky this stuff is without just being able to google everything.

Ok, so you need to go into the PCI card's BIOS and configure it from there. There should be some key combination that you can use to get into the PCI card's BIOS.

You may also have to play with the jumpers on the drive itself. Some cards will work with the cable select setting and some will only work with the master/slave settings.

The IDE cable could also play a part. If you are using a newer IDE cable meant for ATA-66 or higher (the thinner wire with the one wire punched out at the one end), you may want to try a standard IDE cable.. and the other way around as well.

The motherboard's BIOS has nothing to do with the PCI card BIOS detecting drives.

If that fails, you can always get a Promise SATA 150 PCI controller and use that instead.

The 486IS does have an Intel Saturn I chipset (i420TX). This is Intel's first PCI chipset (mid-'93). Remember that these early PCI implementations were rather rudimentary. Usually you had to route the PCI IDE IRQs manually to one particular PCI slot via jumper. For me it is not surprising, that your PCI IDE card doesn't work because it is just too modern. With a board that old you should use an age-appropriate IDE card without own bios.

BastlerMike wrote:

The 486IS does have an Intel Saturn I chipset (i420TX). This is Intel's first PCI chipset (mid-'93). Remember that these early PCI implementations were rather rudimentary. Usually you had to route the PCI IDE IRQs manually to one particular PCI slot via jumper. For me it is not surprising, that your PCI IDE card doesn't work because it is just too modern. With a board that old you should use an age-appropriate IDE card without own bios.

Er...even back then there were loads of PCI, VLB and ISA cards that had their own BIOS (tons of SCSI controllers, for one), and they usually worked fine.

It might be that the PCI IDE card the topic starter is trying to get to work is not compatible with version 1.0 and possibly 2.0 of the PCI bus...

BastlerMike wrote:

Usually you had to route the PCI IDE IRQs manually to one particular PCI slot via jumper.

Yep! This board has options for 9, 10, 14, or 15. I've tried all of them.

yawetaG wrote:

It might be that the PCI IDE card the topic starter is trying to get to work is not compatible with version 1.0 and possibly 2.0 of the PCI bus...

So actually I'm trying two cards, a Maxtor card that looks to be a rebranded Promise Ultra133 TX2, and a more modern card based on an ITE8212F. This board is a PCI 2.0 board AFAIK.

Also, i can get the cards to POST, just not do any drive detection. They aren't RAID cards, so there's no interactive BIOS to enter to change any settings. The last thing I'll try is putting them in a more modern system - I think I have a socket AM2 board that has PCI.

I just looked at the reviews for the Maxtor/Promise card on Newegg.

1. A few people said that they couldn't get any drives to detect
2. One person said they could only get an Optical drive to detect
3. Another person said that no drives over 40GB would work with their card
4. And another person said that Promise had a fix for the not-detecting issue but that they wouldn't fix his card ????
5. Another person said that these cards tend to die after 1-2 years
6. Another person said that they had to have their drives set to CS in order for the card to detect them.