I recently got ahold of old PC hardware, last time I played with this generation of hardware was in my pre-teens.

I wanted to use this Sata adapter card I had laying around in some old drawer, to use a Sata hdd, and not the 16gb hdd that was in the computer
(it still works, but didn't want to touch the win98 install if possible, and I don't have ps2 mouse or keyboard, but I am making a ps2x2pico soon).

Anyway, if I have a HDD attached to the 3512 while trying to boot, even if CDROM is at the top of bootorder, all I get is "Press a key to reboot". like it ignores any bootable cdrom (cd drive spins up at expected time.)
if I disconnect HDD drive from the sata card, the cards rom still displays the text, but doesn't find an HDD and motherboards IDE CDROM boots like expected.

the motherboard is a P3B-F. I flashed latest beta bios with no change on this problem. (original was 1004, beta is 1008.004)

I foudn this thread here on vogons as I was searching for XP TXTMODE driver; Here's the REAL Sil3512 Win98 Driver, BIOS and flasher.

Question is can I flash rom for 3512 on a 3512A?

Also, this thread says the latest ROM is 4.3.70... the option rom on boots for my card says "Sil 3512A SATALink BIOS Version 4.5.02"

Should I prioritize to dump this ROM first? does UPDFLASH have dump/backup?

lastly, I have a SD to IDE adapter coming from Amazon today, so I can run DOS from that and run utilities. before this I was burning CD's... Plop, XP install, I used a win98 cd booted in dos mode to run bios flash from a cd-rw... haha

Thanks for any advice!