Ouch 😳 ! Thanks for the heads up Vetz.

Apologies if I'm asking too many dumb questions, but have no previous experience with these gadgets and need knowledge.

You see any problem/drawback with this two-controller solution for a PIII i440BX?:

· One Promise Fasttrack SATA150 TX4, with a SSD plugged booting the system:

· One Promise Ultra100 TX2 in another PCI slot, with one or two non-booting storage HDD/s plugged:

Reason is I can get those two controllers (four SATA and two IDE headers) for cheaper than a single Promise SATA150 TX2Plus.

Please beaware that using two controllers, both with BIOS'es might result in that one of the cards won't be recognized by the motherboard properly. I've experienced this trying to run my Adaptec SCSI card along with a Silicon Image 3114 S-ATA card. Switching around the PCI slots might sort this out.

Btw, the Silicon Image 3114 that is pretty cheap on Ebay brand new. Works for me and I'm now running a 160GB S-ATA disc on a Socket 7 system. Works in DOS and Win98 without drivers. Didn't even need to set BIOS to SCSI, just "C" for it to be recognized as a harddrive and be bootable. http://www.ebay.com/itm/160367707372?ssPageNa … 984.m1497.l2649

I also recommend SilconImage PCI SATA controllers, i have 2 SATA 1.5 controllers by SiliconImage, both work pretty awesome.

OK, got a Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 for a very reasonable EUR6.

Then I went to the shop, asked for the cheapest SSD they offered 😁 , and got a refurbished Corsair F40 for EUR35.

I had to mod (once more) the venerable Allied PSU, so ancient she didn't had a single SATA power connector 🤣 .

Keeping up with tradition, the first attempt ended in BSOD. IRQ conflict with the Promise controller attempting to use IRQ 5, and the SB AWE64 Gold claiming it as hers exclusively, and breaking the party.

After some harsh language and IRQ redistribution everyone behaved, Windows booted OK, and the Promise recognised the SSD. Then I cloned the system from the CF IDE card to the SSD, aligned the partition with Paragon, set all the Windows tricks healthy for SSDs, and set boot from SCSI in BIOS.

And the old dinosaur flies hypersonically now 😀 :

To put things in context, so ran the drives when connected directly to the i440BX ancient DMA-2/ATA-33 IDE headers. Left to right HDD Seagate 7200.7 pATA-100, CF IDE Card x400:

And so runs a Ramdisk:

A worthy investment to spice up any old machine.

Nice setup indeed!

vetz wrote:

I own that card, stay away from it! Win98 drivers are bugged, and I could not install it on the 440BX system I tested on. It does not have a proper BIOS, so it is not bootable.

Get the Silicon Image cards as mentioned in this thread.

Do you recall what your symptoms were?

To add some diversity to my 486 systems, I have decided to ditch the SCSI and use the Promise SATA150 TX2Plus w/95c and NT4. At first glance, the system seems stable, however I would like to attempt to reproduce your issues.

My main annoyance this far is that I cannot seem to get DOS to recognise the CD-ROM drive, which is connected to the ATA port. The CD-ROM drive works fine in Windows though, or works fine in DOS if I use the MB's built-in PIO4 IDE port.

I have a Pentium 166Mhz based HP Vectra 500 model 562 (D3742A) (Intel Triton 430FX chipset - BIOS Phoenix v.GJ.07.18)
I put a IDEtoCF adapter with two slot with a 4Gb CF card in each on the motherboard's IDE connector.
It works flawlessly with DOS and Win98SE. Nevertheless, speed is not great (7.5Mb/s to 10Mb/s)
My BIOS limits hardisk size to 6449Mb, my 2x4Gb are full and I have some 7 CD games I would I like to play from HD. There is no BIOS update anymore;

I tried to install the PCI to SATA card (Ali M5283 chip). But I got a ressource conflict in BIOS even with all other PCI Cards (USB, Matrox Graphics) removed and integrated IDE controller disabled; and finally the PC hung.

Next I tried anAbit Hotrod 100, I bought last Friday.

With the Hotrod 100 card, the PC beeps on boot with no error message. I didn't find the meaning of the beep (1 long, 2 short, silence, 1 short).

I can't see any message displayed by the IDE Bios' card. I am supposed to have an option to enter a RAID menu.

However Win98SE detected the card and I've installed the lastest Highpoint 370's drivers (found on NVidia's site). I used a formatted CF Card with an IDE adapter plugged on the IDE port of the Hotrod 100 with success but only in Win98SE. There is no ressource conflict.
But with DOS, the card and the drive are not detected.

I also tried to use the IDE card with motherboard's IDE controller disabled (and parallel, serial port, floppy controller disabled too, PCI USB Card removed) and the Abit Hotrod 100 does not to work on boot and with DOS. It's only activated after Win98SE's launch.

I think it's BIOS issue but I can't figure what it is. Some people told me about the BIOS doesn't scan/launch Option ROM. But I have no such option to enable in BIOS. I can't select boot order or bootable Add-in card.
The Phoenix BIOS does not offer a lot of settings to play with.

If someone can help, I will listen to your advice carefully. I have no clue !
I want to use the PCI/IDE card or a SATA Card in DOS Mode.

If the Hotrod card wasn't working in DOS, how would Windows 98 be able to boot? Does the HotRod's BIOS find the hard drives?

What size hard drive are you using and what size hard drive does FDISK report when you allow it to use hard drives over 2 GB? If FDISK only sees 2 GB, then setup a 2 GB partition for Win98SE and let Windows setup a FAT32 partition for the remainder, I assume 10's of GB's?

I use Promise Ultra100, Ultra133, and a SATA150 TX2plus in my non-SCSI and non-RAID systems. The only issue I found was that some PCI 2.0 compliant motherboard's (a socket 4 in particular) don't work with the Promise Ultra 100/133 cards - that is, they won't find any hard drives connected. In this case, you may need a PCI 2.0 compliant card, or just find an PCI IDE card that will work. Some PCI 2.1 and 2.2 cards work in PCI 2.0 compliant motherboards. In my problematic socket 4 board, I found that the SATA150 TX2plus would work, whereas the 100/133's did not.

Thanks for your help @feipoa

Win98se boots from the internal IDE controller.
In this case, the Hotrod100 card works with Win98SE.

My motherboard is Socket7 PCI 2.0 Compliant

So you think I should try other cards ?
Don't you think it's strange I don't see any display of Adapter ROM on booting ?

Yes, that is rather odd. This is usually do to the BIOS not allowing an Option ROM for a particular expansion slot. But sometimes the wording in the BIOS is different from "option rom". On my Acer socket 4 motherboard, this performs what appears to be the same function as enabling an expansion card's Option ROM:

These are not the default settings and needed to be set, otherwise the IDE card's BIOS doesn't show up. But still, even with this, only the Sata150 TX2plus would work on this board.