If there is no jumper, short a data pin of the BIOS chip during POST to prevent it from executing.

It probably isn't worth it to be honest. I was going to replace the card anyway (hence my experiments with SCSI) but that's hardly the point.

I don't think I can do anything anyway, it's a little PLCC which is surface mounted to the board, there's no real way to manipulate it with my 200W soldering gun - at least, no way to do it reversibly. I suppose I could try jamming a screwdriver between the pins but I'd be a little worried I damaged the motherboard, would have to figure out where the traces went.

Edit: Bridging a couple of pins with a pencil proved enough to bypass it, but now I have the problem that the drive the PCI IDE usually boots from doesn't work on the secondary ISA card. So I need a bootable floppy and this was the only machine I had to hand capable of such things. Guess I'll have to drag my 410CDT out or something.

Edit 2: Nope, not gonna happen. Ah well, I didn't like the IDE card much, but it still sucks that it has met its demise a little early. Something very nasty has clearly happened as floppy access is broken when the IDE card is installed in the machine among other things. Cannot repair it currently (Bank balance less than £3) so I guess it's ISA only and no CD-ROM drive until I get this working, the down-side being that I need a new temporary hard drive until then and I don't have any left. Guess I'll have to set up a CF card or something.

I have found the problem

Somebody has tampered with the motherboard's BIOS. I did check but it seems I was using the wrong version of CBROM, I did not realize this until today when I decided to try adding the ITE ROM to the system BIOS in an attempt to get around the problems I am having. Having loaded the correct version of CBROM (Do not know what is wrong with the original I was using as they both show V1.32) I tested it with the /D command only to see that there are a few SCSI ROMS attached to the BIOS ROM... I have no idea who did that or why it only showed up and began executing now, but it is most likely the issue.

The ITE ROM was corrupted, but I can't help wonder, given the card was faulty anyway, if that is just a freak occurence. ITE also noted the BIOS version it had was severely bugged in places and I have updated that card. Now it works every time, even after a soft reset, where before it would disappear or display "ITE 8212 not found!" so in a way, good things came of this.

Great, now I feel like an idiot. Especially given the NCR card came with the motherboard and the seller noted something about the BIOS I don't remember, probably this very thing... Oh, well, I guess the moral here is to never assume the previous owner was a moron (as they clearly weren't) and that they were using a stock configuration (they also weren't).I learn from my mistakes, so yeah, this is good.

Now, if only my IDE hard drive wasn't corrupted and mechanically failing. Ugh, well, at least the otherboard and IDE board do what they're supposed to now. Then again, my Adaptec SCSI card might work now as it won't be fighting with the NCR Option ROM anymore, though I am skeptical about the operational status of my ancient 600MB Seagate hard drive.

I may update this thread later.

Edit: Yeah, currently sat at the DOS prompt. My Adaptec still doesn't work in the board and installing it makes the system report a 16MHz Pentium which is funny for a few seconds until you realize the machine is effectively just a paperweight with the card installed. Guess I could try merging the ROM with the BIOS as it clearly worked for the NCR card.