I don't think your CT1770 has a SCSI BIOS, so it won't boot from any drive connected.

The CT1770 has no floppy connector.
Can you tell us where your floppy drives are connected to?

Ah interesting! It's possible that they aren't connected to anything.. this is a project that is currently in transit to me - I might be trying to plan ahead a little too much since I haven't laid eyes on it yet. I'm basing all of my assumptions a couple of ebay photos - but its been fun trying to trainspot the situation. I'll certainly post a follow up when I get the system but if you're interested in playing along I'm attaching the photos. It was a good deal with very little information so I'm expecting a project!

Looks like you've got onboard I/O. You probably have onboard IDE too, or at least a strong enough chance to wait for the system to come before buying anything.

It's certainly possible - but the board looks a lot like this to me: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-um486v

If you don't have an onboard hard drive connector, I'd advise an XT-IDE device.

They plug into an ISA slot and give you bootable IDE and CF connectors.

SCSI floppy drives are a thing, but pretty rare.

I’d guess from the low quality pictures that the floppy drives are connected to motherboard, and that it’s just obscured from view.

jmej_jmej wrote on 2025-04-18, 07:30:

It's certainly possible - but the board looks a lot like this to me: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-um486v

My eyes are getting too old for the kind of potatocam thumbnails posted here, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the board - if it were there would be 30p SIMMs above the top ISA slot, immediately behind the AT DIN connector. Not sure what is there (I see a few onboard chips...), but it doesn't look like SIMMs to me.

If you can't get any better pics/clearer ID of what you are getting, wait until you actually have the hardware and can figure this out before deciding on storage.

In any event I wouldn't recommend XTIDE or SCSI from the SB16 as that would bottleneck it badly by 8 or 16b ISA bus. If there's no onboard I/O I'd go for a VLB controller; IDE would be simplest, with a passive IDE-CF adapter. But again, there might be VLB I/O onboard. Wait and see.

SCSI is pointless in this day and age, outside very specific cases, eg old servers.
Hard drives are ancient and probably seen heavy 24/7 usages from servers and SCSI2SD is expensive.
IDE hard drives are also pretty old but far more common but IDE to CF or SD card adapters are much cheaper and will give very similar performance.

IMHO stick with IDE unless you really want to play with SCSI just for the fun of it.
I'd also go with a VLB controller, it's kind of special and price are not as inflated as VLB video cards

dionb wrote on 2025-04-18, 11:25:

My eyes are getting too old for the kind of potatocam thumbnails posted here, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the board - if it w […]
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jmej_jmej wrote on 2025-04-18, 07:30:

It's certainly possible - but the board looks a lot like this to me: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-um486v

My eyes are getting too old for the kind of potatocam thumbnails posted here, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the board - if it were there would be 30p SIMMs above the top ISA slot, immediately behind the AT DIN connector. Not sure what is there (I see a few onboard chips...), but it doesn't look like SIMMs to me.

If you can't get any better pics/clearer ID of what you are getting, wait until you actually have the hardware and can figure this out before deciding on storage.

In any event I wouldn't recommend XTIDE or SCSI from the SB16 as that would bottleneck it badly by 8 or 16b ISA bus. If there's no onboard I/O I'd go for a VLB controller; IDE would be simplest, with a passive IDE-CF adapter. But again, there might be VLB I/O onboard. Wait and see.

Thinking it might be this one (ECS UM486V AIO )... https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-um486v-aio