Greetings all, perhaps one or more of you could enlighten me on what is going on here.

To start, it is not my intention to boot from the CF card on any of these systems.

Scope - secondary storage by way of CF cards.

Common variables - Two 512 Mb CF cards, CHS 993/16/63. One card is a new Transcend Industrial (purple) card, the other, a used Cisco. Both are able to be read to, written to, and programs run off them in a 486 computer using a CF adapter (the very same that's in the 386 and Pentium)

Problem #1 - 386 SX NEAT chipset will not read CF card contents accurately.

Goal #1 - Boot from traditional hard disk, CF as D:\

Setup #1 - one 256 Mb HDD in the 386 (as boot drive), one 512 Mb HDD CF card as secondary. BIOS accepts the drives, can read from the CF card, and even sometimes write, but not run anything. Read errors, drive not ready errors, programs abort .Local hard disk has DOS 5.0.

Troubleshooting:
-Installed 540 Mb HDD (physical drive from a 486) into 386 with very similar CHS settings (IIRC 1060/16/63) - Drive powers on and does its best to start Win95 on a 16 MHz SX.
-Replaced IDE cable (even going so far as using an 80 pin EIDE) with known good units
-Replaced I/O card with known good
-Removed unnecessary accessories
-Replaced actual CF adapter with a known good unit
-Put the BIOS settings to default
-Removed 256 Mb IDE hard disk and replaced it with the 512 CF card - booted from floppy using Caldera DOS from a special CF card boot disk that I used to use on my Pentium MMX (next item) to transfer files. Can see directory listings as before, but programs hang or error out upon running. The same results are produced when booting from DOS 6.2. Both CF cards behave identially.

What gives? I've seen a number of you having 286s that boot off these things and are otherwise usable systems. I'm not even asking that much 🙁

Suggestions?

Problem #2 - Pentium MMX Aopen AP5T motherboard tries to boot from CF card instead of SCSI disk despite boot order override in BIOS. Once the BIOS sees that there is a "hard drive", it assigns it C:\, then the BIOS of the AHA 2940 assigns the SCSI drive a D:\ designation. There must be a way to circumvent this. Computer's BIOS has boot options such as SCSI, C, A (or A, C) and D, (some other combinations) etc. None of these seem to matter - once the CF card (any - I even put 2 GB ones in here) are detected and assigned a letter, the SCSI card gives the SCSI drive D:\, BIOS installed successfully, and a hard lock condition exists.

It is noteworthy that when I had a VX chipset, I was able to boot from a floppy and have rudimentary file access to both the SCSI and IDE (CF) drive - this was not ideal, but it was better than my current situation.

Goal #2 - At the very least, boot from A:\ in such a way that the SCSI drive and the CF card are visible. Ideally, boot from SCSI as C: with IDE present as anything other than C:.

Setup #2 -AHA 2940 boots from a 17 Gb SCSI HDD. IDE 0 master is a CDROM, IDE 0 slave is a CF card, IDE 1 Master is a ZIP100 drive, IDE 1 slave is a DVDROM. When there is no CF card, AHA BIOS loads 0:0 as C: and the system boots. If there is a "hard drive" present, AHA loads the 0:0 as D:\ (THIS is the problem)

Troubleshooting:

-Replaced IDE cabling
-Removed extraneous IDE devices and placed the CF "hard drive" on the various channels and Master/Slave configurations
-Reset BIOS to default
-Changed boot order in computer's BIOS
-Went into AHA 2940's BIOS and, to the best of my ability, combed the settings
-Replaced the AHA 2940 with an identical card
-Tried various CF cards - same result.

Is there a way to force the AHA 2940 to assign the SCSI hard disk a C: letter over what the computer's BIOS assigns?